
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside
Canada, check your country's copyright laws.
IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY,
DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: The African Queen
Author: Forester, C. S. [Cecil Scott]
   [Smith, Cecil Louis Troughton] (1899-1966]
Date of first publication: 1935
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979
   ["in association with Michael Joseph"]
   [reprint of 1956 edition]
Date first posted: 1 March 2018
Date last updated: 1 March 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1509

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






THE AFRICAN QUEEN

by C. S. Forester




CHAPTER ONE


Although she herself was ill enough to justify being in bed had she been
a person weak-minded enough to give up, Rose Sayer could see that her
brother, the Reverend Samuel Sayer, was far more ill. He was very, very
weak indeed, and when he knelt to offer up the evening prayer the
movement was more like an involuntary collapse than a purposed gesture,
and the hands which he raised trembled violently. Rose could see, in the
moment before she devoutly closed her eyes, how thin and transparent
those hands were, and how the bones of the wrists could be seen with
almost the definition of a skeleton's.

The damp heat of the African forest seemed to be intensified with the
coming of the night, which closed in upon them while they prayed. The
hands which Rose clasped together were wet as though dipped in water,
and she could feel the streams of sweat running down beneath her clothes
as she knelt, and forming two little pools at the backs of her bent
knees. It was this sensation which helped most to reconcile Rose's
conscience to the absence, in this her approaching middle age, of her
corset--a garment without which, so she had always been taught, no woman
of the age of fourteen and upwards ever appeared in public. A corset, in
fact, was quite an impossibility in Central Africa, although Rose had
resolutely put aside, as promptings of the evil one, all the thoughts
she had occasionally found forming in her mind of wearing no
underclothing at all beneath her white drill frock.

Under the stress of this wet heat that notion even returned at this
solemn moment of prayer, but Rose spurned it away and bent her mind once
more with anguished intensity to the prayer which Samuel was offering in
his feeble voice and with his halting utterance. Samuel prayed for
heavenly guidance in the ordering of their lives, and for the
forgiveness of their sins. Then as he began to utter his customary
petition for the blessing of God upon the mission, his voice faltered
more and more. The mission, to which they had given their lives, could
hardly be said to exist, now that von Hanneken and his troops had
descended upon the place and had swept off the entire village, converts
and heathen alike, to be soldiers or bearers in the Army of German
Central Africa, which he was assembling. Livestock and poultry, pots and
pans and foodstuffs, all had been taken, even the portable chapel,
leaving only the mission bungalow standing on the edge of the deserted
clearing. So the weakness vanished from Samuel's voice as he went on to
pray that the awful calamity of war which had descended upon the world
would soon pass away, that the slaughter and destruction would cease,
and that when they had regained their sanity men would turn from war to
universal peace. And with the utterance of the last of his petition
Samuel's voice grew stronger yet, as he prayed that the Almighty would
bless the arms of England and carry her safely through this the severest
of all her trials, and would crown her efforts with victory over the
godless militarists who had brought about this disaster. There was a
ring of fighting spirit in Samuel's voice as he said this, and an Old
Testament flavour in his speech, as another Samuel had once prayed for
victory over the Amalekites.

'Amen! Amen! Amen!' sobbed Rose with her head bowed over her clasped
hands.

They knelt in silence for a few seconds when the prayer was finished,
and then they rose to their feet. There was still just light enough for
Rose to see Samuel's white-clad figure and his white face as he stood
there swaying. She made no move to light the lamp. Now that German
Central Africa was in arms against England no one could tell when next
they would be able to obtain oil, or matches. They were cut off from all
communication with the world save through hostile territory.

'I think, sister,' said Samuel, faintly, 'that I shall retire now.'

Rose did not help him to undress--they were brother and sister and
strictly brought up and it would have been impossible to her unless he
had been quite incapable of helping himself--but she crept in in the
dark after he was in bed to see that his mosquito curtains were properly
closed round him.

'Good night, sister,' said Samuel. Even in that sweltering heat his
teeth were chattering.

She herself went back to her own room and lay on her string bed in a
torment of heat, although she wore only her thin nightdress. Outside she
could hear the noise of the African night, the howling of the monkeys,
the shriek of some beast of prey and the bellow of crocodiles down by
the river, with, as an accompaniment to it all--so familiar that she did
not notice it--the continuous high-pitched whine of the cloud of
mosquitoes outside her curtains.

It may have been midnight before she fell asleep, moving uneasily in the
heat, but it was almost dawn when she awoke. Samuel must have been
calling to her. Barefooted, she hurried out of her bedroom and across
the living-room into Samuel's room. But if Samuel had been sufficiently
conscious to call to her he was not so now. Most of what he was saying
seemed unintelligible. For a moment it appeared as if he was explaining
the failure of his life to the tribunal before which he was so soon to
appear.

'The poor Mission,' he said, and--'It was the Germans, the Germans.'

He died very soon after that, while Rose wept at his bedside. When her
paroxysm of grief passed away she slowly got to her feet. The morning
sun was pouring down upon the forest and lighting the deserted clearing,
and she was all alone.

The fear which followed her grief did not last long. Rose Sayer had not
lived to the age of thirty-three, had not spent ten years in the Central
African forest, without acquiring a capable self-reliance to add to the
simple faith of her religion. It was not long before a wild resentment
against Germany and the Germans began to inflame her as she stood in the
quiet bungalow with the dead man. She told herself that Samuel would not
have died if his heart had not been broken by the catastrophe of von
Hanneken's requisitions. It was that which had killed Samuel, the sight
of the labours of ten years being swept away in an hour.

Rose told herself that the Germans had worse than Samuel's death upon
their souls. They had injured the work of God; Rose had no illusion how
much Christianity would be left to the converts after a campaign in the
forest in the ranks of a native army of which ninety-nine men out of a
hundred would be rank heathen.

Rose knew the forest. In a vague way she could picture a war fought over
a hundred thousand square miles of it. Even if any of the mission
converts were to survive they would never make their way back to the
mission--and even if they should, Samuel was dead.

Rose tried to persuade herself that this damage done to the holy cause
was a worse sin than being instrumental in Samuel's death, but she could
not succeed in doing so. From childhood she had been taught to love and
admire her brother. When she was only a girl he had attained the
wonderful, almost mystic distinction of the ministry, and was invested
in her eyes with all the superiority which that implied. Her very father
and mother, hard devout Christians that they were, who had never spared
the rod in the upbringing of their children, deferred to him then, and
heard his words with respect. It was solely due to him that she had
risen in the social scale over the immeasurable gap between being a
small tradesman's daughter and a minister's sister. She had been his
housekeeper and the most devoted of his admirers, his most faithful
disciple and his most trusted helper for a dozen years. There is small
wonder at her feeling an un-Christian rancour against the nation who had
caused his death.

And naturally she could not see the other side of the question. Von
Hanneken, with no more than five hundred white men in a colony peopled
by a million Negroes of whom not more than a few thousand even knew they
were subjects of the German flag, had to face the task of defending
German Central Africa against the attacks of the overwhelming forces
which would instantly be directed upon him. It was his duty to fight to
the bitter end, to keep occupied as many of the enemy as possible for as
long as possible, and to die in the last ditch if necessary while the
real decision was being fought out in France. Thanks to the British
command of the sea he could expect no help whatever from outside; he
must depend on his own resources entirely, while there was no limit to
the reinforcements which might reach the enemy. It was only natural,
then, that with German military thoroughness he should have called up
every man and woman and child within reach, as bearers or soldiers, and
that he should have swept away every atom of food or material he could
lay his hands on.

Rose saw no excuse for him at all. She remembered she had always
disliked the Germans. She remembered how on her first arrival in the
colony with her brother German officialdom had plagued them with
inquisitions and restrictions, had treated them with scorn and contempt,
and with the suspicion which German officials would naturally evince at
the intrusion of a British missionary in a German colony. She found she
hated their manners, their morals, their laws, and their ideals--in fact
Rose was carried away in the wave of international hatred which engulfed
the rest of the world in August 1914.

Had not her martyred brother prayed for the success of British arms and
the defeat of the Germans? She looked down at the dead man, and into her
mind there flowed a river of jagged Old Testament texts which he might
have employed to suit the occasion. She yearned to strike a blow for
England, to smite the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Midianites. Yet
even as the hot wave of fervour swept over her she pulled herself up
with scorn of herself for day-dreaming. Here she was alone in the
Central African forest, alone with a dead man. There was no possible
chance of her achieving anything.

It was at this very moment that Rose looked out across the veranda of
the bungalow and saw Opportunity peering cautiously at her from the edge
of the clearing. She did not recognize it as Opportunity; she had no
idea that the man who had appeared there would be the instrument she
would employ to strike her blow for England. All she recognized at the
moment was that it was Allnutt, the Cockney engineer employed by the
Belgian gold-mining company two hundred miles up the river--a man her
brother had been inclined to set his face sternly against as an
un-Christian example.

But it was an English face, and a friendly one, and the sight of it made
her more appreciative of the horrors of solitude in the forest. She
hurried on to the veranda and waved a welcome to Allnutt.




CHAPTER TWO


Allnutt was still apprehensive. He looked round him cautiously as he
picked his way through the native gardens towards her.

'Where's everybody, miss?' he asked as he came up to her.

'They've all gone,' said Rose.

'Where's the Reverend--your brother?'

'He's in there--He's dead,' said Rose.

Her lips began to tremble a little as they stood there in the blazing
sunlight, but she would not allow herself to show weakness. She shut her
mouth like a trap into its usual hard line.

'Dead, is 'e? That's bad, miss,' said Allnutt--but it was clear that for
the moment his sympathy was purely perfunctory. Allnutt's apprehension
was such that he could only think about one subject at a time. He had to
go on asking questions.

''Ave the Germans been 'ere, miss?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Rose. 'Look.'

The wave of her hand indicated the bare central circle of the village.
Had it not been for von Hanneken this would have been thronged with a
native market, full of chattering, smiling Negroes with chickens and
eggs and a hundred other things for barter, and there would have been
naked pot-bellied children running about, and a few cows in sight, and
women working in the gardens, and perhaps a group of men coming up from
the direction of the river laden with fish. As it was there was nothing,
only the bare earth and the ring of deserted huts, and the silent forest
hemming them in.

'It's like 'ell, isn't it, miss?' said Allnutt. 'Up at the mine I found
it just the sime when I got back from Limbasi. Clean sweep of
everything. What they've done with the Belgians God only knows. And God
'elp 'em, too. I wouldn't like to be a prisoner in the forest of that
long chap with the glass eye--'Anneken's 'is nime, isn't it, miss? Not a
thing stirring at the mine until a nigger who'd esciped showed up. My
niggers just bolted for the woods when they 'eard the news. Don't know
if they were afride of me or the Germans. Just skipped in the night and
left me with the launch.'

'The launch?' said Rose, sharply.

'Yerss, miss. The _African Queen_. I'd been up the river to Limbasi with
the launch for stores. Up there they'd 'eard about this war, but they
didn't think von 'Anneken would fight. Just 'anded the stuff over to me
and let me go agine. I fort all the time it wouldn't be as easy as they
said. Bet they're sorry now. Bet von 'Anneken done the sime to them as
'e done at the mine. But 'e 'asn't got the launch, nor yet what's in
'er, which 'e'd be glad to 'ave, I dare say.'

'And what's that?' demanded Rose.

'Blasting gelatine, miss. Eight boxes of it. An' tinned grub. An'
cylinders of oxygen and hydrogen for that weldin' job on the crusher.
'Eaps of things. Old von 'Anneken'd find a use for it all. Trust 'im for
that.'

They were inside the bungalow now, and Allnutt took off his battered
sun-hat as he realized he was in the presence of death. He bowed his
head and lapsed into unintelligibility. Garrulous as he might be when
talking of war or of his own experiences, he was a poor hand at formal
condolences. But there was one obvious thing to say.

''Scuse me, miss, but 'ow long 'as 'e been dead?'

'He died this morning,' said Rose. The same thought came into her mind
as was already in Allnutt's. In the tropics a dead man must be buried
within six hours, and Allnutt was further obsessed with his desire to
get away quickly, to retire again to his sanctuary in the river
backwaters far from German observation.

'I'll bury 'im, miss,' said Allnutt. 'Don't you worry yourself, miss.
I'll do it all right. I know some of the service. I've 'eard it often
enough.'

'I have my prayer book here. I can read the service,' she said, keeping
her voice from trembling.

Allnutt came out on the veranda again. His shifty gaze swept the edge of
the forest for Germans, before it was directed upon the clearing to find
a site for a grave.

'Just there'd be the best place,' he said. 'The ground'll be light there
and 'e'd like to be in the shide, I expect. Where can I find a spide,
miss?'

The pressing importance of outside affairs was of such magnitude in
Allnutt's mind that he could not help but say, in the midst of the
grisly business--

'We'd better be quick, miss, in case the Germans come back agine.'

And when it was all over and Rose stood in sorrow beside the grave with
its makeshift cross. Allnutt moved restlessly beside her.

'Come on darn to the river, miss,' he urged. 'Let's get awye from 'ere.'

Down through the forest towards the river ran a steep path; where it
reached the marshy flats it degenerated into something worse than a
track. Sometimes they were up to their knees in mud. They slipped and
staggered, sweating under the scanty load of Rose's possessions.
Sometimes tree-roots gave them momentary foothold. At every step the
rank marigold smell of the river grew stronger in their nostrils. Then
they emerged from the dense vegetation into blinding sunlight again. The
launch swung at anchor, bow upstream, close to the water's edge. The
rushing brown water made a noisy ripple round anchor chain and bows.

'Careful now, miss,' said Allnutt. 'Put your foot on that stump. That's
right.'

Rose sat in the launch which was to be so terribly important to her and
looked about her. The launch hardly seemed worthy of her grandiloquent
name of _African Queen_. She was squat, flat-bottomed, and thirty feet
long. Her paint was peeling off her, and she reeked of decay. A tattered
awning roofed in six feet of the stern; amidships stood the engine and
boiler, with the stumpy funnel reaching up just higher than the awning.
Rose could feel the heat from the thing where she sat, as an addition to
the heat of the sun.

'Excuse me, miss,' said Allnutt. He knelt in the bottom of the boat and
addressed himself to the engine. He hauled out a panful of hot ashes and
dumped them over-side with a sizzle and a splutter. He filled the
furnace with fresh wood from the pile beside him, and soon smoke
appeared from the funnel and Rose could hear the roar of the draught.
The engine began to sigh and splutter--Rose was later to come to know
the sequence of sounds so well--and then began to leak grey pencils of
steam. In fact the most noticeable point about the appearance of the
engine was the presence of those leaks of steam, which poured out here,
there, and everywhere from it. Allnutt peered at his gauges, thrust some
more wood into the furnace, and then leaped forward round the engine.
With grunts and heaves at the small windlass he proceeded to haul in the
anchor, the sweat pouring from him in rivers. As the anchor came clear
and the rushing current began to sweep the boat in to the bank he came
dashing aft again to the engine. There was a clanking noise, and Rose
felt the propeller begin to vibrate beneath her. Allnutt thrust mightily
at the muddy bank with a long pole, snatched the latter on board again,
and then came rushing aft to the tiller.

'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. In later years Rose could never picture
Allnutt to herself without a cigarette--generally allowed to go
out--stuck to his upper lip half-way 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 the 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 _Knigin Luise_, whose name Allnutt characteristically anglicized 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 had been roads to
hack through the forest, and enormous burdens to be carried. The
_Knigin 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 _Knigin 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 _Knigin 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 'im 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 reason 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 or 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 eyebrows as she tried to think. It seemed absurd that there
was nothing two people with a boat full of high explosive could do to an
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 Russo-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 hundred 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 be
made of housekeeping problems.

It was not easy, this forming of her own judgements; 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 passages 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, and 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 a 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 of
displaying 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 there were
still the beginnings of a plan, even though it was a vague plan, and
despite Allnutt's decisive statement that the descent of the river was
impossible.

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 have 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 on the subject. No one could
expect Allnutt working by himself in the heart of the African forest
with only the _African Queen_'s repair outfit to 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 flood.

'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
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 hosannas 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 was the faintest
possibility of his end counterbalancing his earlier sins--a matter on
which Rose felt uncertainty. To obtain his necessary cooperation 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
four knots would be quite insufficient to allow her 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 _Knigin 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 over-side 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 eyelid 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.

'Come on,' said Rose. 'Aren't we going to start?'

'Wot, _now_, miss?'

'Yes, now. Come along.'

Allnutt was up against hard facts again. It was enough in his opinion to
have agreed with the lady, to have admitted her to be right as a
gentleman should. Allnutt's impression was that they might start
tomorrow if the gods were unkind; next week if they were favourable. To
set off like this, at half an hour's notice, to torpedo the German navy
seemed to him unseemly, or at least unnatural.

'There isn't two hours of daylight left, miss,' he said, looking down
the backwater to the light on the river.

'We can go a long way in two hours,' said Rose, shutting her mouth
tight. In much the same way her mother had been accustomed to saying 'a
penny saved is a penny earned', in the days of the little general shop
in the small north country manufacturing town.

'I'll 'ave to get the ole kettle to boil agine,' said Allnutt.

Yet he got down from his seat and took up his habitual attitude beside
the engine.

There were embers still glowing in the furnace; it was only a few
minutes after filling it with wood and slamming the door that it began
its cheerful roar, and soon after that the engine began to sigh and
splutter and leak steam. Allnutt commenced the activities which had been
forced upon him by the desertion of his two Negro hands--winding in the
anchor, shoving off from the bank, and starting the propeller turning,
all as nearly simultaneously as might be. In that atmosphere, where the
slightest exertion brought out a sweat, these activities caused it to
run in streams; his dirty jacket was soaked between his shoulder-blades.
And, once under way, constant attention to the furnace and the engine
gave him no chance to cool down.

Rose watched his movements. She was anxious to learn all about this
boat. She took the tiller and set herself to learn to steer. During the
first few minutes of the lesson she thought to herself that it was a
typical man-made arrangement that the tiller had to be put to the right
to turn the boat to the left, but that feeling vanished very quickly; in
fact, under Allnutt's coaching, it was not very long before she even
began to see sense in a convention which spoke of 'port' and
'starboard'--Rose had always previously had a suspicion that that
particular convention had its roots in man's queer taste for ceremonial
and fuss.

The voyage began with a bit of navigation which was exciting and
interesting, as they threaded their way through backwaters among the
islands. There were snags about, and floating vegetation, nearly
submerged, which might entangle the screw, and there were shoals and
mudbanks to be avoided. It was not until some minutes had elapsed, and
they were already a mile or two on their way, that a stretch of easy
water gave Rose leisure to think, and she realized with a shock that she
had left behind the mission station where she had laboured for ten
years, her brother's grave, her home, everything there was in her world,
in fact, and all without a thought.

That was the moment when a little wave of emotion almost overcame her.
Her eyes were moist and she sniffed a little. She reproached herself
with not having been more sentimental about it. Yet immediately after a
new surge of feeling overcame the weakness. She thought of the _Knigin
Luise_ flaunting her iron-cross flag on the Lake where never a white
ensign could come to challenge her, and of the Empire needing help, and
of her brother's death to avenge. And, womanlike, she remembered the
rudenesses and insults to which Samuel had patiently submitted from the
officialdom of the colony; they had to be avenged, too. And--although
Rose never suspected it--there was within her a lust for adventure,
patiently suppressed during her brother's life, and during the
monotonous years at the mission. Rose did not realize that she was
gratified by the freedom which her brother's death had brought her. She
would have been all contrition if she had realized it, but she never
did.

As it was, the moment of weakness passed, and she took a firmer grip of
the tiller, and peered forward with narrowed eyelids over the glaring
surface of the river. Allnutt was being fantastically active with the
engine. All those grey pencils of steam oozing from it were indicative
of the age of that piece of machinery and the neglect from which it had
suffered. For years the muddy river water had been pumped direct into
the boiler, with the result that the water tubes were rotten with rust
where they were not plugged with scale.

The water-feed pump, naturally, had a habit of choking, and always at
important moments, demanding instant attention lest the whole boiler
should go to perdition--Allnutt had to work it frantically by hand
occasionally, and there were indications that in the past he or his
Negro assistants had neglected this precaution, disregarding the
doubtful indication of the water gauge, with the result that every
water-tube joint leaked. Practically every one had been mended at some
time or other, in the botched and unsatisfactory manner with which the
African climate leads man to be content at unimportant moments; some had
been brazed in, but more had been patched with nothing more solid than
sheet iron, red lead, and wire.

As a result, a careful watch had to be maintained on the pressure-gauge.
In the incredibly distant past, when that engine had been new, a boiler
pressure of eighty pounds to the square inch could be maintained, giving
the launch a speed of twelve knots. Nowadays if the pressure mounted
above fifteen the engine showed unmistakable signs of dissolution, and
no speed greater than four knots could be reached. So that Allnutt had
the delicate task of keeping the pressure just there, and no higher and
no lower, which called for a continuous light diet for the furnace and a
familiarity with the eccentricities of the pressure gauge which could
only be acquired by long and continuous study. Nor was this attention to
the furnace made any easier by the tendency of the wood fuel to choke
the draught with ash--Allnutt, when stoking, had to plan his campaign
like a chess player, looking six moves ahead at least, bearing in mind
the effect on the draught of emptying the ash pan, the relative
inflammability of any one of the half a dozen different kinds of wood,
the quite noticeable influence of direct sunlight on the boiler, the
chances of the safety valve sticking (someone had once dropped something
heavy on this, and no amount of subsequent work on it could make it
quite reliable again) and the likelihood of his attention being shortly
called away to deal with some other crisis.

For the lubrication was in no way automatic nowadays; oil had to be
stuffed down the oil-cups on the tops of the cylinders, and there were
never less than two bearings calling for instant cooling and
lubrication, so that Allnutt when the _African Queen_ was under way was
as active as a squirrel in a cage. It was quite remarkable that he had
been able to bring the launch down single-handed from the mine to the
mission station after the desertion of his crew, for then he had to
steer the boat as well, and keep the necessary look-out for snags and
shoals.

'Wood's running short,' said Allnutt, looking up from his labours, his
face grey with grime, and streaked with sweat. 'We'll have to anchor
soon.'

Rose looked round at where the sun had sunk to the treetops on the
distant bank.

'All right,' she said, grudgingly. 'We'll find somewhere to spend the
night.'

They went on, with the engine clanking lugubriously, to where the river
broke up again into a fresh batch of distributaries. Allnutt cast a last
lingering glance over his engine, and scuttled up into the bows.

'Round 'ere, miss,' he called, with a wave of his arm.

Rose put the tiller over and they surged into a narrow channel.

'Round 'ere again,' said Allnutt. 'Steady! There's a channel 'ere. Bring
'er up into it. Steady! Keep 'er at that!'

They were heading upstream now, in a narrow passage roofed over by
trees, whose roots, washed bare by the rushing brown water, and tangled
together almost as thick as basket work, constituted the surface of the
banks. Against the sweeping current the _African Queen_ made bare
headway. Allnutt let go the anchor, and, running back, shut off steam.
The launch swung stationary to her mooring with hardly a jerk.

For once in a way Rose had been interested in the manoeuvres, and she
filled with pride at the thought that she had understood them--she never
usually troubled; when travelling by train she never tried to understand
railway signals, and even the Italian first officer had never been able
to rouse her interest in ships' work. But today she had understood the
significance of it all, of the necessity to moor bows upstream in that
narrow fast channel, in consequence of the anchor being in the bows.
Rose could not quite imagine what that fast current would do to a boat
if it caught it while jammed broadside on across a narrow waterway, but
she could hazard a guess that it would be a damaging business. Allnutt
stood watching attentively for a moment to make certain that the anchor
was not dragging, and then sat down with a sigh in the sternsheets.

'Coo,' he said, 'it's 'ot work, ain't it, miss? I could do with a
drink.'

From the locker beside her he produced a dirty enamel mug, and then a
second one.

'Going to 'ave one, miss?' Allnutt asked.

'No,' said Rose, shortly. She knew instinctively that she was about to
come into opposition with what Samuel always called Rum. She watched
fascinated. From under the bench on which he sat Allnutt dragged out a
wooden case, and from out of the case he brought a bottle, full of some
clear liquid like water. He proceeded to pour a liberal portion into the
tin mug.

'What is that?' asked Rose.

'Gin, miss,' said Allnutt. 'An' there's only river water to drink it
with.'

Rose's knowledge of strong drink was quite hazy. The first time she had
ever sat at a table where it was served had been in the Italian steamer;
she remembered the polite amusement of the officers when she and her
brother had stiffly refused to drink the purple-red wine which appeared
at every meal. During her brother's ministry in England she had heard
drink and its evil effects discussed; there were even bad characters in
the congregation who were addicted to it, and with whom she had
sometimes tried to reason. At the mission Samuel had striven
ineffectively for ten years to persuade his coloured flock to abandon
the use of the beer they had been accustomed to brew from time
immemorial--Rose knew how very ineffective his arguments had been. And
there were festivals when everybody brewed and drank stronger liquors
still, and got raging drunk, and made fearful noises, and all had sore
heads the next morning, and not even the sore heads had reconciled
Samuel to the backsliding of his congregation the night before.

And the few white men all drank, too--although up to this minute Rose,
influenced by Samuel's metaphorical description, had been under the
impression that their tipple was a fearsome stuff called Rum, and not
this innocent-appearing gin. Rum, and the formation of unhallowed unions
with native women, and the brutal conscription of native labour, had
been the triple-headed enemy Samuel was always in arms against. Now Rose
found herself face to face with the first of these sins. Drink made men
madmen. Drink rotted their bodies and corrupted their souls. Drink
brought ruin in this world and damnation in the next.

Allnutt had filled the other mug over-side, and was now decanting water
into the gin, trying carefully but not very effectively, to prevent too
much river alluvium from entering his drink. Rose watched with
increasing fascination. She wanted to protest, to appeal to Allnutt's
better feelings, even to snatch the terrible thing from him, and yet she
stayed inert, unmoving. Possibly it was that common sense of hers which
kept her quiescent. Allnutt drank the frightful stuff and smacked his
lips.

'That's better,' he said.

He put the mug down. He did not start being maniacal, nor to sing songs,
nor to reel about the boat. Instead, with his sinfulness still wet on
his lips he swung open the gates of Paradise for Rose.

'Now I can think about supper,' he said. 'What about a cup o' tea,
miss?'

Tea! Heat and thirst and fatigue and excitement had done their worst for
Rose. She was limp and weary and her throat ached. The imminent
prospects of a cup of tea roused her to trembling excitement. Twelve
cups of tea each Samuel and she had drunk daily for years. Today she had
had none--she had eaten no food either, but at the moment that meant
nothing to her. Tea! A cup of tea! Two cups of tea! Half a dozen great
mugs of tea, strong, delicious, revivifying! Her mind was suffused with
rosy pictures of an evening's tea drinking, a debauch compared with
which the spring sowing festivities at the village by the mission
station were only a pale shade.

'I'd like a cup of tea,' she said.

'Water's still boiling in the engine,' said Allnutt, heaving himself to
his feet 'Won't take a minute.'

The tinned meat that they ate was, as a result of the heat, reduced to a
greasy semi-liquid mass. The native bread was dark and unpalatable. But
the tea was marvellous. Rose was forced to use sweetened condensed milk
in it, which she hated--at the mission they had cows until von Hanneken
commandeered them--but not even that spoilt her enjoyment of the tea.
She drank it strong, mug after mug of it, as she had promised herself,
with never a thought of what it was doing inside her to the lining of
her stomach; probably it was making as pretty a picture of that as ever
she had seen at a Band of Hope lantern lecture where they exhibited
enlarged photographs of a drunkard's liver. She gulped down mug after
mug. For a moment her body temperature shot up to fever heat, but
presently there came a blissful perspiration--not the sticky, prickly
sweat in which she moved all day long, but a beneficent and cooling
fluid, bringing with it a feeling of ease and well-being.

'Those Belgians up at the mine wouldn't never drink tea,' said Allnutt,
tilting the condensed milk tin over his mug of black liquid. 'They
didn't know what was good.'

'Yes,' said Rose. She felt positive friendship for Allnutt welling up
within her. She slapped at the mosquitoes without irritation.

When the scanty crockery had been washed and put away Allnutt stood up
and looked about him; the light was just failing.

'Ain't seen no crocodiles in this arm, miss, 'ave you?' he asked.

'No,' said Rose.

'No shallows for 'em 'ere,' said Allnutt. 'And current's too fast.'

He coughed a little self-consciously.

'I want to 'ave a bath before bedtime,' he said.

'So do I.'

'I'll go up in the bows an' 'ave mine 'olding on to the anchor chain,'
said Allnutt. 'You stay down 'ere and do what you like, miss. Then if we
don't look it won't matter.'

Rose found herself stripping herself naked right out in the open, with
only a dozen feet away a man doing the same, and only a slender funnel
six inches thick between them. Somehow it did not matter. Rose was
conscious that out of the tail of her eye she could see a greyish-white
shape lower itself over the launch's bows, and she could hear prodigious
kickings and splashings as Allnutt took his bath. She sat naked on the
low gunwale in the stern and lowered her legs into the water. The fast
current boiled round them, deliriously cool, tugging at her ankles,
insidiously luring her farther. She slipped over completely, holding on
to the boat, trailing her length on the surface of the water. It was
like Paradise--ever so much better than her evening bath at the mission,
in a shallow tin trough of lukewarm water, and obsessed with the
continual worry lest the unceasing curiosity of the natives should cause
prying eyes to be peering at her through some chink or crevice in the
walls.

Then she began to pull herself out. It was not easy, what with the pull
of the current and the height of the gunwale, but a final effort of her
powerful arms drew her up far enough to wriggle at last over the edge.
Only then did she realize that she had been quite calmly contemplating
calling to Allnutt for assistance, and she felt that she ought to be
disgusted with herself, but she could not manage it. She fished a towel
out of her tin box of clothes and dried herself, and dressed again. It
was almost dark by now, dark enough, anyway, for a firefly on the bank
to be visible, and for the noises of the forest to have stilled so much
that the sound of the river boiling along the banks seemed to have grown
much louder.

'Are you ready, miss?' called Allnutt, starting to come aft.

'Yes,' said Rose.

'You better sleep 'ere in the stern,' said Allnutt, 'case it rains. I
got a couple of rugs 'ere. There ain't no fleas in 'em.'

'Where are you going to sleep?'

'For'rard, miss. I can make a sort of bed out o' them cases.'

'What, on the--the explosives?'

'Yerss, miss. Won't do it no 'arm.'

That was not what had called for the question. To Rose there seemed
something against nature in the idea of actually sleeping on a couple of
hundredweights of explosive, enough to lay a city in ruins--or to blow
in the side of a ship. But she thrust the strangeness of the thought out
of her mind; everything was strange now.

'All right,' she said, briefly.

'You cover up well,' said Allnutt, warningly. 'It gets nearly cold on
the river towards morning--look at the mist now.'

A low white haze was already drifting over the surface of the river.

'All right,' said Rose again.

Allnutt retraced his steps into the bows, and Rose made her brief
preparations for the night. She did not allow herself to think about the
skins--black or white, clean or dirty--which had already been in contact
with those rugs. She laid herself on the hard floor-boards with the rugs
about her and her head on a pillow of her spare clothing. Her mind was
like a whirlpool in which circled a mad inconsequence of thoughts. Her
brother had died only that morning and it seemed at least a month ago.
The memory of his white face was vague although urgent. With her eyes
closed her retinas were haunted with persistent, after-images of running
water--water foaming round snags and rippling over shallows, and all
agleam with sunshine where the wind played upon it. She thought of the
_Knigin Luise_ queening it on the Lake. She thought of Allnutt, only a
yard or two from her virgin bed, and of his naked body vanishing over
the side of the launch. She thought again of the dead Samuel. The
instant resolution which followed to avenge his death caught her on the
point of going to sleep. She turned over restlessly. The flies were
biting like fiends. She thought of Allnutt's drooping cigarette, and of
how she had cheated him into accompanying her. She thought of the play
of the light and shade on the water when they had first anchored. And
with that shifting pattern in her mind's eye she fell asleep for good,
utterly worn out.




CHAPTER THREE


Rose actually contrived to sleep most of the night. It was the rain
which woke her up, the rain and the thunder and lightning. It took her a
little while to think where she was, lying there in the dark on those
terribly hard floor-boards. All round her was an inferno of noise. The
rain was pouring down as it only can in Central Africa. It was drumming
on the awning over her, and streaming in miniature waterfalls from the
trees above into the river. The lightning was lighting up brilliantly
even this dark backwater, and the thunder roared almost without
intermission. A warm wind came sweeping along the backwater, blowing the
launch upstream a little so that whenever it dropped for a moment the
pull of the current brought her back with a jerk against her moorings
like a small earthquake. Almost at once Rose felt the warm rain on her
face, blown in by the wind under the awning, and then the awning began
to leak, discharging little cataracts of water on to the floor-boards
round her.

It all seemed to happen at once--one moment she was asleep, and the next
she was wet and uncomfortable and the launch was tugging at her anchor
chain. Something moved in the waist of the launch, and the lightning
revealed Allnutt crawling towards her, very wet and miserable, dragging
his bedding with him. He came pattering up beside her, whimpering for
all the world like a little dog. The leaky awning shot a cataract of
water down his neck.

'Coo!' he said, and shifted his position abruptly.

By some kind chance Rose's position was such that none of these direct
streams descended upon her; she was only incommoded by the rain in the
wind and the splashes from the floor-boards. But that was the only space
under the awning as well protected. Allnutt spent much time moving
abruptly here and there, with the pitiless streams searching him out
every time. Rose heard his teeth chattering as he came near her, and was
for a moment minded to put out her arm and draw him to her like a child;
she blushed secretly at discovering such a plan in her mind, for Allnutt
was no more a child than she was.

Instead she sat up and asked--

'What can we do?'

'N-nothing, miss,' said Allnutt miserably and definitely.

'Can't you shelter anywhere?'

'No, miss. But this won't last long.'

Allnutt spoke with the spiritless patience bred by a lifetime's bad
luck. He moved out of one stream of water into another. Samuel in the
same conditions would have displayed a trace of bad temper--Rose had to
measure men by Samuel's standards because she knew no other man so well.

'You poor man!' said Rose.

'You poor chap' or 'You poor old thing' might have sounded more
comradely or sympathetic, but Rose had never yet spoken of men as
'chaps' or 'old things'.

'I'm so sorry,' said Rose, but Allnutt only shifted uncomfortably again.

Then the storm passed as quickly as it came. In a country where it rains
an inch in an hour an annual rainfall of two hundred inches means only
two hundred hours' rain a year. For a little while the trees above still
tossed and roared in the wind and then the wind died away, and there was
a little light in the backwater, and with the stillness of dawn the
sound of the river coursing through the tree-roots overshadowed every
other noise. The day came with a rush, and for once the sun and the heat
were beneficent and life-giving, instead of being malignant tyrants.
Rose and Allnutt roused themselves; the whole backwater steamed like a
laundry.

'What's to be done before we move on?' asked Rose. It did not occur to
her that there was anything they might do instead of moving on, Allnutt
scratched at his sprouting beard.

'Got no wood,' he said. ''Ave to fill up with thet. Plenty of dead stuff
'ere, I should fink. An' we'll 'ave to pump out. The ole boat leaks
anyways, an' wiv all this rine--'

'Show me how to do that.'

So Rose was introduced to the hand pump, which was as old and as
inefficient as everything else on board. In theory one stuck the foot of
it down between the skin and the floor-boards, and then worked a handle
up and down, whereupon the water beneath the boards was sucked up and
discharged through a spout over-side; by inclining the boat over to the
side where the pump was the boat could be got reasonably dry. But that
pump made a hard job of it. It choked and refused duty and squeaked and
jammed, and pinched the hands that worked it, all with an ingenuity
which seemed quite diabolical. Rose came in the end to hate that pump
more bitterly than anything she had ever hated before. Allnutt showed
her how to begin the job.

'You go and get the wood,' said Rose, settling the pump into the
scuppers and preparing to work the handle. I'll do this by myself.'

Allnutt produced an axe which was just as rusty and woebegone as
everything else in the boat, hooked the bank with the boat-hook, and
swung himself ashore with the stern painter in his hand. He vanished
into the undergrowth, looking cautiously round at every step for fear of
snakes, while Rose toiled away at the pump. There was nothing on earth
so ingeniously designed to abolish the feeling of morning freshness.
Rose's face empurpled, and the sweat poured down as she toiled away with
the cranky thing. At intervals Allnutt appeared on the bank, dumping
down fresh discoveries of dead wood to add to the growing pile at the
landing-place, and then, pulling in on the stern painter, he began the
ticklish job of loading the fuel on board, standing swaying perilously
on the slippery uneven foothold.

Rose quitted her work at the pump to help him--there was by now only a
very little water slopping below the floor-boards--and when the wood was
all on board, the waist piled high with it, they stopped for breath and
looked at each other.

'We had better start now,' said Rose.

'Breakfast?' said Allnutt, and then, playing his trump card, 'Tea?'

'We'll have that going along,' said Rose. 'Let's get started now.'

Perhaps Rose had all her life been a woman of action and decision, but
she had spent all her adult life under the influence of her brother.
Samuel had been not merely a man but a minister, and therefore had a
twofold--perhaps fourfold--right to order the doings of his womenfolk.
Rose had always been content to follow his advice and abide by his
judgement.

But now that she was alone the reaction was violent. She was carrying
out a plan of her own devising, and she would allow nothing to stop her,
nothing to delay her. She was consumed by a fever for action. That is
not to belittle the patriotic fervour which actuated her as well. She
was most bitterly determined upon doing something for England; she was
so set and rigid in this determination that she never had to think about
it, any more than she had to think about breathing or the beating of her
pulse. She was more conscious of the motive of avenging her brother's
death; but perhaps the motive of which she was most conscious was her
desire to wipe out the ten years of insults from German officialdom to
which the meek Samuel had so mildly submitted. It was the thought of
those slights and insults which brought a flush to her cheek and a
firmer grip to her hand, and spurred her on to fresh haste.

Allnutt philosophically shrugged his shoulders, much as he had seen his
Belgian employers do up at the mine. The woman was a bit mad, but it
would be more trouble to argue with her than to obey her, at present;
Allnutt was not sufficiently self-analytical to appreciate that most of
the troubles of his life resulted from attempts to avoid trouble. He
addressed himself, in his usual attitude of prayer, to the task of
getting the engine fire going again, and while the boiler was heating he
continued the endless task of lubrication. When the boiler began to sigh
and gurgle he looked inquiringly at Rose, and received a nod from her.
Rose was interested to see how Allnutt proposed to extricate the launch
from the narrow channel in which she was moored.

It was a process which called for much activity on Allnutt's part. First
he strained at the anchor winch, ineffectively, because the current
which was running was too strong to allow him to wind the heavy boat up
to the anchor. So he started the screw turning until the _African Queen_
was just making headway against the current, and then, rushing forward,
he got the anchor clear and wound in. But he did not proceed up the
backwater--there was no means of knowing if the way was clear all the
way up to the main stream, and some of these backwaters were half a
dozen miles long. Instead, he hurried back to the engine and throttled
down until the launch was just being carried down by the current
although the engine was still going ahead.

This gave her a queer contrariwise steerage way in which one thought in
terms of the stern instead of the bow. Allnutt left the engine to look
after itself and hastened back to take the tiller from Rose's hand; he
could not trust her with it. He eased the _African Queen_ gently down
until they reached the junction with the broad channel of the main
backwater. Then he scuttled forward and jerked the engine over into
reverse, and then, scuttling back to the tiller, he swept the stern
round upstream, keeping a wary eye on the bow meanwhile lest the current
should push it into the bank, and then, the moment the bow was clear,
while catastrophe threatened astern, he dashed forward again, started
the screw in the opposite direction, and came leaping back once more to
the tiller to hold the boat steady while she gathered way downstream. It
was a neat bit of boatmanship; Rose, even with her limited experience,
could appreciate it even though some of the implications were lost upon
her--the careful balance of eddy against current at the bend, for
instance, and the subtle employment of the set of the screw to help in
the turn. She nodded and smiled her approval, but Allnutt could not stay
for applause. Already there were danger signals from the engine, and
Allnutt had to hand over the tiller and resume his work over it.

The _African Queen_ resumed her solemn career down the river, with Rose
happily 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
under-water 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 wind; a brisk
breeze whipped the surface of the river into choppy wavelets which
obscured the warning signs.

At present today 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 engines were 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 away from them 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. Quite 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 worn 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 many
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 and his
army were 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, and along the border of the
Lake, and about the head-waters 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 mudbars, 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.




CHAPTER FOUR


There 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 nearer to him.

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

'We ain't goin' no farther 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 declaration by Allnutt, but
it had not occurred to her that there was anything like this in his
mind.

'No 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 tomorrer,' said Allnutt, 'we'll be in the rapids tomorrer
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.'

'But they won't be able to stop us.'

'Won't be able--! Don't talk silly, miss. They'll 'ave rifles. Some of
them machine-guns, p'raps. Cannons, p'raps. The river ain't more than
'alf a mile wide.'

'Let's go past at night, then.'

'That won't do, neither. 'Cause the rapids start just below Shona. That
'ill Shona stands on is the beginning of the cliffs the river runs
between. If we was to go past Shona in the dark we'd 'ave to go on darn
the rapids in the dark. An' I ain't goin' darn no rapids in the dark,
neither. An' I ain't goin' darn no rapids at all, neither, neither. We
didn't ought to 'ave come darn as far as this. It's all damn-bloody
barmy. They might find us _'ere_ if they was to come out in a canoe from
Shona. I'm goin' back tomorrer up to that other backwater we was in
yesterdye. That's the sifest plice for us.'

Allnutt had shaken off all shame and false modesty. He preferred
appearing a coward in Rose's eyes to risking going under fire at Shona
or to attempting the impossible descent of the gorges of the Ulanga.
There was not going to be any more hanky-panky about it. He drank neat
gin to set the seal on his resolution.

Rose was white with angry disappointment. She tried to keep her temper,
to plead, to cajole, but Allnutt was in no mood for argument. For a
while he was silent now, and made no attempt to combat Rose's urgings,
merely opposing to them a stolid inertia. Only when, in the growing
darkness. Rose called him a liar and a coward--and Rose in her sedate
upbringing had never used those words to anyone before--did he reply.

'Coward, yourself,' he said. 'You ain't no lady. No, miss. That's what
my poor ole mother would 'ave said to _you_. If my mother was to 'ear
you--'

When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he
is past all argument, as Rose began to suspect. She drew herself stiffly
together in the sternsheets while Allnutt's small orgy continued. She
was alone in a small boat with a drunken man--a most dreadful situation.
She sat tense in the darkness, ready to battle for her life or her
virtue, and quite certain that one or the other would be imperilled
before morning. Every one of Allnutt's blundering movements in the
darkness put her on the _qui vive_. When Allnutt knocked over his mug or
poured himself out another drink she sat with clenched fists, convinced
that he was preparing for an assault. There was a frightful period of
time while Allnutt was in muddled fashion reaching beneath the bench for
the case of gin to find another bottle, during which she thought he was
crawling towards her.

But Allnutt was neither amorous nor violent in his cups. His mention of
his mother brought tears into his eyes. He wept at his mother's memory,
and then he wept over the fate of Carrie, which was his name for the
brawny Swahili-speaking Negress who had been his mistress at the mine
and who was now Heaven knew where in the train of von Hanneken's army.
Then he mourned over his own expatriation, and he sobbed through his
hiccups at the thought of his boyhood's friends in London. He began to
sing, with a tunelessness which was almost unbelievable, a song which
suited his mood--

    'Gimmy regards ter Leicester Square
    Sweet Piccadilly an' Myefair
    Remember me to the folks darn ther
    They'll understa-and.'

He dragged out the last note to such a length that he forgot what he was
singing, and he made two or three unavailing attempts to recapture the
first fine careless rapture before he ceased from song. Then in his
mutterings he began to discuss the question of sleep, and, sure enough,
the sound of his snores came before long through the darkness to Rose's
straining ears. She had almost relaxed when a thump and a clatter from
Allnutt's direction brought her up to full tension again. But his
peevish exclamations told her that he had only fallen from the seat to
the floor-boards, mugs, bottle and all, and in two minutes he was
happily snoring again, while Rose sat stiff and still, and chewed the
cud of her resentment against him, and the reek of the spilt gin filled
the night air.

Despair and hatred kept her from sleep. At that moment she had no hope
left on earth. Her knowledge of men--which meant her knowledge of Samuel
and of her father--told her that when a man said a thing he meant it and
nothing on earth would budge him from that decision. She could not
believe that Allnutt would ever be induced, or persuaded, or bullied,
into attempting to pass Shona, and she hated him for it. It was the
first time she had ever really set her heart on anything, and Allnutt
stood in her way immovable. Rose wasted no idle dreams on quixotic plans
of getting rid of Allnutt and conducting the _African Queen_
single-handed; she was level-headed enough and sufficiently aware of her
own limitations not to think of that for a second.

At the same time she seethed with revolt and resentment, even against
the god-like male. Although for thirty years she had submitted quite
naturally to the arbitrary decisions of the superior sex, this occasion
was different. She wanted most passionately to go on; she knew she ought
to; conscience and inclination combined to make her resent Allnutt's
change of front. There was nothing left to live for if she could not get
the _African Queen_ down to the Lake to strike her blow for England; and
such was the obvious sanctity of such a mission that she stood convicted
in her own mind of mortal sin if she did not achieve it. Her bitterness
against Allnutt increased.

She resolved, as the night wore on, to make Allnutt pay for his
arbitrariness. She set her teeth, she chewed at her nails--and Rose's
mother's slipper had cured her of nail-biting at the age of twelve--as
she swore to herself to make Allnutt's life Hell for him. Rose had never
tried to raise Hell in her life, but in her passion of resentment she
felt inspired to it. In the darkness her jaw came forward and her lips
compressed until her mouth was no more than a thin line and there were
deep parentheses from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. Anyone
who could have seen Rose at that moment would have taken her for a
shrew, a woman with a temper of a fiend. Now that Samuel was dead Rose
had no use for patience or resignation or charity or forgiveness or any
of the passive Christian virtues.

Nor was her temper improved by a night of discomfort. Cramps and aches
made her change her position, but she could not, even if she would, lie
down in the sternsheets where Allnutt was all asprawl across the boat,
and she would not make her way forward to take up Allnutt's usual nest
among the explosives. She sat and suffered on the ribbed bench, on which
she had sat all day, and even her shapely and well-covered hind-quarters
protested. She slept, towards morning, by fits and starts, but that
amount of sleep did nothing towards mollifying her cold rage.

Dawn revealed to her Allnutt lying like a corpse on the floor-boards.
His face, hardly veiled by the sprouting beard, was a dirty grey, and
from his open mouth came soft but unpleasing sounds. There was no
pleasure in the sight of him. Rose got to her feet and stepped over him;
she would have spurned him with her foot save that she did not want to
rouse him to violent opposition to what she was going to do. She dragged
out the case of gin, took out a bottle and stripped the lead foil from
the end. The cork was of the convenient kind which needs no corkscrew.
She poured the stuff over-side, dropped the bottle in after it, and
began on another.

When for the third time the glug-glug-glug of poured liquid reached
Allnutt's ears he muttered something, opened his eyes, and tried to sit
up.

'Jesus!' he said.

It was not the sight of what Rose was doing which called forth the
exclamation, for he still did not know the reason for the noise which
had roused him. Allnutt's head was like a lump of red-hot pain. And it
felt as if his head, besides, were nailed to the floor-boards, so that
any attempt at raising it caused him agony. And his eyes could not stand
the light; opening them intensified the pain. He shut his eyes and
moaned; his mouth was parched and his throat ached, too.

Allnutt was not a natural-born drinker; his wretched frame could not
tolerate alcohol. It is possible that his small capacity for liquor
played a part in the unknown explanation of his presence in German
Central Africa. And one single night's drinking always reduced him to
this pitiful state, sick and white and trembling, and ready to swear
never to drink again--quite content, in fact, not to drink for a month
at least.

Rose paid no attention to his moaning and whimpering. She flung one look
of scorn at him and then poured the last bottle of the case over-side.
She went forward and dragged the second case of gin out from among the
boxes of stores. She took Allnutt's favourite screwdriver and began to
prise the case open, with vicious wrenches of her powerful wrist. As the
deal came away from the nails with a splintering crash Allnutt rolled
over to look at her again. With infinite trouble he got himself into a
sitting position, with his hands at his temples, which felt as if they
were being battered with white-hot hammers. He looked at her quite
uncomprehending with his aching eyes.

'Coo Jesus!' he said, pitifully.

Rose wasted neither time nor sympathy on him; she went calmly on pouring
gin over-side. Allnutt got to his knees with his arms on the bench. At
the second attempt he got his knees up on the bench, with his body
hanging over-side. Rose thought he would fall in, but she did not care.
He leaned over the gurgling brown water and drank feverishly. Then he
slumped back on the bench and promptly brought up all the water he had
drunk, but he felt better, all the same. The light did not hurt his eyes
now.

Rose dropped the last bottle into the river, and made certain there was
no other in the case. She returned to the sternsheets, passing him close
enough to touch him, but apparently without noticing his presence. She
took her toilet things from her tin box, picked up a rug, and went back
again into the bows. By the time Allnutt was able to turn his head in
that direction the rug was pinned from the funnel-stay to the funnel,
screening her from view. When she took down the rug again her toilet was
obviously finished; she folded the rug, still without paying him the
least attention, and began to prepare her breakfast, and then to eat it
with perfect composure. Breakfast completed, she cleared all away, and
came back into the stern, but she still gave him neither look nor word.
With an appearance of complete abstraction she picked out the dirty
clothes from her tin box and began to wash them over-side, pinning each
garment out to dry to the awning overhead. And when she had finished the
washing she sat down and did nothing; she did not even look at Allnutt.
This was, in fact, the beginning of the Great Silence.

Rose had been able to think of no better way of making Allnutt's life a
hell--she did not realize that it was the most effective way possible.
Rose had remembered occasions when Samuel had seen fit to be annoyed
with her, and had in consequence withdrawn from her the light of his
notice and the charm of his conversation, sometimes for as much as
twenty-four hours together. Rose remembered what a dreadful place the
bungalow had become then, and how Samuel's silence had wrought upon her
nerves, until the blessed moment of forgiveness. She could not hope to
equal Samuel's icily impersonal quality, but she would do her best,
especially as she could not, anyway, bring herself to speak to the
hateful Allnutt. She had no reliance in her ability to nag, and nagging
was the only other practicable method of making Allnutt's life hell for
him.

During the morning Allnutt did not take very special notice of his
isolation. His wretched mind and body were too much occupied in getting
over the effects of drinking a bottle and a half of overproof spirit in
a tropical climate. But as the hours passed, and draught after draught
of river water had done much towards restoring their proper rhythm to
his physiological processes, he grew restless. He felt that by now he
had earned forgiveness for his late carouse; and it irked him unbearably
not to be able to talk as much as he was accustomed. He thought Rose was
angry at him for his drunkenness; he attached little importance, in his
present state, to the matter of his refusal to go on past Shona and down
the rapids.

'Coo, ain't it 'ot?' he said. Rose paid him no attention.

'We could do wiv anuvver storm,' said Allnutt. 'Does get yer cool fer a
minute, even if these little b--beggars bite 'arder than ever after it.'

Rose remembered a couple of buttons that had to be sewn on. She got out
the garment and her housewife, and calmly set about the business. At her
first movement Allnutt had thought some notice of his existence was
about to be taken, and he felt disappointed when the purpose of the
movement became apparent.

'Puttin' yer things to rights prop'ly, ain't yer, miss?' he said.

A woman sewing has a powerful weapon at her disposition when engaged in
a duel with a man. Her bent head enables her to conceal her expression
without apparently trying; it is the easiest matter in the world for her
to simulate complete absorption in the work in hand when actually she is
listening attentively; and if even then she feels disconcerted or needs
a moment to think she can always play for time by reaching for her
scissors. And some men--Allnutt was an example--are irritated
effectively by the attention paid to trifles of sewing instead of to
their fascinating selves.

It took only a few minutes for Allnutt to acknowledge the loss of the
first round of the contest.

'Ain't yer goin' to answer me, miss?' he said, and then, still eliciting
no notice, he went on--'I'm sorry for what I done last night. There! I
don't mind sayin' it, miss. What wiv the gin bein' there to my 'and,
like, an' the 'eat, an' what not, I couldn't 'elp 'avin' a drop more
than I should 'ave. You've pied me back proper already, pourin' all the
rest of it awye, now 'aven't you, miss? Fair's fair.'

Rose made no sign of having heard, although a better psychologist than
Allnutt might have made deductions from the manner of twirling the
thread round the shank and the decisive way in which she oversewed to
end off. Allnutt lost his temper.

''Ave it yer own wye, then, yer psalm-singing ole bitch,' he said, and
pitched his cigarette-end over-side with disgust and lurched up into the
bows--Rose's heart came up into her mouth at his first movement, for she
thought he was about to proceed to physical violence. His true purpose
fortunately became apparent before she had time to obey her first
impulse and put down her sewing to defend herself. She converted her
slight start into a test of the ability of the button to pass through
the hole.

From his earliest days, from his slum-bred father and mother, Allnutt
had heard, and believed, that the ideal life was one with nothing to do,
nothing whatever, and plenty to eat. Yet up to today he had never
experienced that ideal combination. He had never been put to the
necessity of amusing himself; he had always had companions in his
leisure periods. Solitude was as distressing to him as responsibility,
which was why, when his Negro crew had deserted him at the mine, he had
involved himself in considerable personal exertion to come down to the
mission station and find Rose and Samuel. And to be cooped,
compulsorily, in a thirty-foot boat was harassing to the nerves,
especially nerves as jangled as Allnutt's. Allnutt fidgeted about in the
bows until he got on Rose's nerves as well; but Rose kept herself under
control.

It was not long before Allnutt, moving restlessly about the boat, began
to occupy himself with overhauling the engine. For a long time that
engine had not had so much attention as Allnutt lavished on it today. It
was greased and cleaned and nurse-maided, and a couple of the botched
joints were botched a little more effectively. Then Allnutt found he was
thoroughly dirty, and he washed himself with care, and in the middle of
the washing he thought of something else, and he went to his locker and
got out his razor and cleaned it of the thick grease which kept it from
rusting and set himself to shave. It was only sheer laziness which had
caused him to cease to shave when war broke out, and which accounted for
that melodramatic beard. Shaving a beard like that was painful, but
Allnutt went through with it, and when it was over he stroked his
baby-smooth cheeks with satisfaction. He put cylinder oil on his tousled
hair and worked at it until he had achieved the ideal coiffure with an
artistic quiff along his forehead. He replaced his things in his locker
with elaborate care and sat down to recover. Five minutes later he was
on his feet again, moving about the cramped space wondering what he
could do now. And all round him was the silence of the river; that in
itself was sufficient to get on his nerves.




CHAPTER FIVE


A man of stronger will than Allnutt, or a more intelligent one, might
have won that duel with Rose. But Allnutt was far too handicapped. He
could not do chess problems in his head, or devote his thoughts to
wondering what was the military situation in Europe, or debate with
himself the pros and cons of Imperial Preference, or piece together all
the fragments of Shakespeare he could remember. He knew no fragments of
Shakespeare at all, and his mind had never been accustomed to doing any
continuous thinking, so that in a situation in which there was nothing
to do but think he was helpless. In the end it was the noise of the
river eternally gurgling round the tree-roots which broke down his last
obstinacy.

Allnutt had made several attempts to get back on a conversational
footing with Rose, and only once had he managed to induce her to say
anything.

'I hate you,' she had said then. 'You're a coward and you tell lies, and
I won't speak to you ever.'

And she had shaken herself free. The very first advance Allnutt had made
had surprised her. All she had hoped to achieve was revenge, to make
Allnutt suffer for the failure of her scheme. She had not believed it
possible that she might reduce him to obedience by this means. She had
no idea of the power at her disposal, and she had never had to do with a
weak-willed man before. Her brother and her father were men with streaks
of flint-like obstinacy within their pulpy exteriors. It was only when
Allnutt began to ask for mercy that it dawned upon her that she might be
able to coerce him into obeying her. By that time, too, she had a better
appreciation of the monotony of the river, and its possible effect on
Allnutt.

Her one fear was lest Allnutt should become violent. She had steeled
herself to hear unmoved anything he might say to her, or any indelicate
expressions he might employ, but the thought of physical force
undoubtedly gave her a qualm. But she was a well-set-up woman, and she
put unobtrusively into her waist-belt the stiletto from her work-bag. If
he should try to rape her (Rose did not use the word 'rape' to herself;
she thought of his trying to 'do that to her') she would dig at him with
it; its point was sharp.

She need not have worried. Physical violence, even towards a woman, was
a long way from Allnutt's thoughts. It might have been different if
there had been any gin left to give him the necessary stimulus, but
providentially all the gin was in the river.

Just as Rose had underestimated her power, so had Allnutt underestimated
his offence. At first he had taken it for granted that Rose was angry
with him because he had got drunk. Her scheme for going on down the
river was so ludicrously wild that he hardly thought about it when the
silence began; it was only by degrees that he came to realize that Rose
was in earnest about it, and that she would give him no word and no look
until he had agreed to it. It was this realization which stiffened up
his obstinacy after his preliminary apologies and strengthened him to
endure another twenty-four hours of torture.

For it was torture, of a refinement only to be imagined by people of
Allnutt's temperament who have undergone something like his experiences.
There was nothing to do at all except to listen to the gurgle of the
river among the tree-roots and to endure the attack of insects in the
crushing heat. Allnutt could not even walk about in the cumbered little
launch. Silence was one of the things he could not endure; his childhood
in shrieking streets and his subsequent life in machine-shops and
engine-rooms had given him no taste for it. But the silence was only a
minor part of the torture; what Allnutt felt more keenly still was
Rose's presence, and her manner of ignoring him. That riled him
inexpressibly. It was possible that he could have borne the silence of
the river if it had not been for the continuous irksomeness of Rose's
silent presence. That hurt him in a sensitive spot, his vanity, in a
manner of speaking, or his self-consciousness.

In the end it even interfered with Allnutt's sleep, which was the surest
sign of its effectiveness. Insomnia was a quite new phenomenon to
Allnutt, and worried him enormously. Days without exercise for either
body or mind, a slightly disordered digestion, and highly irritable
nerves combined to deprive Allnutt of sleep for one entire night. He
shifted and twisted and turned on his uncomfortable bed on the
explosives; he sat up and smoked cigarettes; he fidgeted and he tried
again unavailingly. He really thought there was something seriously
wrong with him. Then in the morning, faced with yet another appalling
blank day, he gave in.

'Let's 'ear wotcha wanter do, miss,' he said. 'Tell us, and we'll do it.
There, miss.'

'I want to go down the river,' said Rose.

Once more appalling visions swept across Allnutt's imagination, of
machine-guns and rocks and whirlpools, of death by drowning, of capture
by the Germans and death in the forest of disease and exhaustion. He was
frightened, and yet he felt he could not stay a minute longer in this
backwater. He was panicky with the desire to get away, and in his panic
he plunged.

'All right, miss,' he said. 'Carm on.'

Some time later the _African Queen_ steamed out of the backwater into
the main river. It was a broad, imposing piece of water here. There was
more wind blowing than there had been for some time, and up the length
of the river ran long easy waves, two feet high, on which the _African
Queen_ pitched in realistic fashion, with splashes of spray from the
bows which sizzled occasionally on the boiler.

Rose sat at the tiller in a fever of content. They were on their way to
help England once more. The monotony of inaction was at an end. The wind
and the waves suited her mood. It is even possible that the thought that
they were about to run into danger added to her ecstasy.

'That's the 'ill Shona stands on,' Allnutt yelled to Rose,
gesticulating. Rose only nodded, and Allnutt bent over the fire again
cursing under his breath. Even when they had started Allnutt had still
hoped. He had not been quite sure how far down Shona was. Something
might easily happen to postpone the issue before they reached there. He
really meant to burn out a water-tube at the right moment, so that they
would have to lie up again for repairs before making the attempt. But
now they were in sight of Shona unexpectedly; if the engine were
disabled the current would bring them right down to the place, and there
was no shelter on either bank. They would be prisoners instantly, and,
appalling though the choice was, Allnutt would rather risk his life than
be taken prisoner. He began feverishly to nurse the engine into giving
its best possible running.

The waist of the launch was heaped with the wood collected that morning;
Allnutt crouched behind the pile and hoped it could stop a bullet. He
saw that ready to his hand were the chunks of rotten wood which would
give an instant blaze and a quick head of extra steam when the moment
came. He peered at the gauges. The _African Queen_ came clattering
majestically down the river, a feather of smoke from her funnel, spray
flying from her bows, a white wake behind her.

The Askaris on the hills saw her coming, and ran to fetch the white
commandant of the place. He came hurriedly to the mud walls (Shona is a
walled village) and mounted the parapet, staring at the approaching
launch through his field-glasses. He took them from his eyes with a
grunt of satisfaction; he recognized her as the _African Queen_, the
only launch on the Ulanga, for which he had received special orders from
von Hanneken to keep a sharp look-out. She had been lost to
sight--skulking in backwaters, presumably--for some time, and her
capture was desirable. The German captain of reserve was glad to see her
coming in like this. Presumably the English missionaries and the
mechanic had tired of hiding, or had run short of food, and were coming
in to surrender.

There could be no doubt that that was what they intended, for a mile
below Shona, just beyond the next bend, in fact, the navigation of the
river ceased where it plunged into the gorges. She would be a useful
addition to his establishment; he would be able to get about in her far
more comfortably than by the forest paths. And if ever the English,
coming up by the old caravan route, reached the opposite side of the
river, the launch would be of great assistance in the defence of the
crossing. The mere mention of her capture would be a welcome change in
the eternal dull reports he had to send by runner to von Hanneken.

He was glad she was coming in. He stood and watched her, a white speck
on the broad river. Clearly the people in her did not know where the
best landing-place was. They were keeping to the outside of the bend in
the fast current, on the opposite side to the town. They must be
intending to come in below the place, where there was a belt of marshy
undergrowth--it was silly of them. When they came in he would send a
message to them to come back up the river to the canoe-landing place,
where he could come and inspect them without getting himself filthy and
without having to climb the cliff.

He walked over to the adjacent face of the town to observe her further
progress round the bend. The fools were still keeping to the outside of
the bend. They showed no signs of coming in at all. He put his hands to
his helmet brim, for they were moving now between him and the sun, and
the glare was dazzling. They weren't coming in to surrender after all.
God knew what they intended, but whatever it was, they must be stopped.
He lifted up his voice in a bellow, and his dozen Askaris came trotting
up, their cartridge belts over their naked chests, their Martini rifles
in their hands. He gave them their orders, and they grinned happily, for
they enjoyed firing off cartridges, and it was a pleasure which the
stern German discipline denied them for most of their time. They slipped
cartridges into the breeches, and snapped up the levers. Some of them
lay down to take aim. Some of them kept their feet, and aimed standing
up, as their instincts taught them. The sergeant chanted the mystic
words, which he did not understand, telling them first to aim and then
to fire. It was a ragged enough volley when it came.

The captain of reserve looked through his glasses; the launch showed no
signs of wavering from her course, and kept steadily on, although the
fools in her must have heard the volley, and some at least of the
bullets must have gone somewhere near.

'Again,' he growled, and a second volley rang out, and still there was
no alteration of course towards the town on the part of the launch. This
was growing serious. They were almost below the town now, and
approaching the farther bend. He snatched a rifle from one of the
Askaris and threw himself on his stomach on the ramparts. Someone gave
him a handful of cartridges, and he loaded and took aim. They were right
in the eye of the sun now, and the glare off the water made the
foresight indistinct. It was very easy to lose sight of the white awning
of the boat as he aimed.

A thousand metres was a long range for a Martini rifle with worn
rifling. He fired, reloaded, fired again, and again, and again. Still
the launch kept steadily on. As he pointed the rifle once more at her
something came between him and the launch; it was the trees on the
farther point. They were round the corner. With a curse he jumped to his
feet, and, rifle in hand, he ran lumbering along the ramparts with his
Askaris behind him. Sweating, he galloped down across the village
clearing and up the steep path through the forest the other side.
Climbing until he thought his heart would burst he broke through the
undergrowth at last at the top of the cliff where he could look down the
last reach of the river before the cataract. They had almost reached the
farther end; the launch was just swinging round to take the turn. The
captain of reserve put his rifle to his shoulder and fired hurriedly,
twice, although, panting as he was, there was no chance of hitting. Then
they vanished down the gorge and there was nothing more he could do.

Yet he stood staring down between the cliffs for a long minute. Von
Hanneken would be furious at the news of the loss of the launch, but
what more could he have done? He could not justly be expected to have
foreseen this. No one in their senses would have taken a steam launch
into the cataract, and a reserve officer's training does not teach a man
to guard against cases of insanity. The poor devils were probably dead
already, dashed to pieces against the rocks; and the launch was gone for
good and all. He could not even take steps to recover fragments, for the
tall cliffs between which the river ran were overhanging and unscalable,
and not five kilometres from Shona the country became so broken and
dense that the course of the lower Ulanga was the least known, least
explored part of German Central Africa. Only Spengler--another born
fool--had got through it.

The captain of the reserve was not going to try; he formed that resolve
as he turned away from the cliff-top. And as he walked back to Shona,
bathed in sweat, he was still undecided whether he should make any
mention of this incident in his report to von Hanneken. It would only
mean trouble if he did; von Hanneken would be certain it was all his
fault, and von Hanneken was a tyrant. It might be better to keep quiet
about it. The launch was gone and the poor devils in it were dead. That
little worm of a missionary and his horse-faced wife--or was it his
sister? Sister, of course. And the English mechanic who worked on the
Belgian mine. He had a face like a rat. The world would not miss them
much. But he was sorry for the poor devils, all the same.

When he came up through the gate again into Shona he was still not sure
whether or not he would inform von Hanneken of the incident. The Askaris
would gossip, of course, but it would be a long time before the gossip
reached von Hanneken's ears.




CHAPTER SIX


The rivers of Africa are nearly all rendered unnavigable along some part
of their course by waterfalls and cataracts. The rivers on their way to
the sea fall from the central tableland into the coastal plain, but the
Ulanga is not one of this category. Its course is inland, towards the
Great Lakes, and its cataracts mark the edge of the Great Rift Valley.
For in the centre of Africa an enormous tract of territory, longer than
it is wide, has sunk bodily far below the level of the tableland,
forming a deep trough, of a total area approaching that of Europe, in
which are found the Great Lakes with their own river system, and,
ultimately, the source of the Nile.

Along much of their length the sides of this trough are quite steep, but
the Ulanga, as befits the noble river it is, has scoured out its bed and
cut back along it so that nowhere in its course is there an actual
waterfall; its cataracts indicate the situation of strata of harder rock
which have not been cut away as efficiently as have the softer beds. The
natural result is that in its course from the tableland to the valley
the Ulanga flows frequently through deep sunless gorges between high
cliffs; overhead is rough steep country untravelled and unmapped in
which the presence of a river could hardly be suspected.

At Shona the river begins its descent; because that is the last point at
which the river may be crossed by raft or canoe, the old slave caravan
route along the edge of the rift passes the Ulanga here, and Shona grew
up as the market at the point of intersection of caravan route and river
route. The choice of site at the top of the cliff overlooking the river,
where the gorge has actually begun, was of course due to the need of
protection from slave-raiders who, being quite willing to sell their own
fathers if they saw a profit in it, were never averse to snapping up
business acquaintances should they be so careless as not to take proper
precautions.

It was down the outside of the great bend on which Shona stands that
Rose steered the _African Queen_. It was convenient that on this course
they not merely kept in the fastest current but also were as far away as
possible from the village. She looked up the steep bank, across the wide
expanse of water. The forest came to an end half-way up the slope; near
the crest she could see high red walls, and above them the thatched
roofs of the huts on the very top of the hill. It was too far to see
details. She could see no sign of their coming being noticed. There was
no sign of life on the banks; and as they went on down the river the
banks grew rapidly higher and steeper into nearly vertical walls of
rock, fringed at the foot with a precarious growth of vegetation.

She looked at the red walls on the top of the cliff; she thought she
could see a movement there, but it was half a mile off and she could not
be sure. Perhaps von Hanneken had swept off the inhabitants here as he
had done along the rest of the river, to leave a desert in the possible
path of the approach of the English. They were practically opposite the
town now, and nothing had happened. A glance at the near bank showed her
the speed at which they were moving; the river was already running much
faster in its approach to the cataracts.

Suddenly there was a peculiar multiple noise in the air, like bees in a
violent hurry accompanied by the sound of tearing paper. Rose's mind had
just time to take note of the sound when she heard the straggling
reports of the rifles which had caused it. The volley echoed back from
cliff to cliff, growing flatter the longer the sound lasted.

'They've got us!' said Allnutt, leaping up in the waist. His face was
lop-sided with excitement. Rose could pay no attention to him. She was
looking keenly ahead at the swirls on the surface. She was keeping the
_African Queen_ in the fastest water along the very edge of the back
eddy off the bank.

There came another volley which still left them untouched. Rose edged
the tiller over so as to get more in mid-stream, in order to take the
reverse bend which was rapidly approaching. Allnutt remained standing in
the waist; he had forgotten all about taking shelter behind the
woodpile. Rose swung the tiller over for the bend; so absorbed was she
in her steering that she did not notice the bullet which whipped close
by her as she did so. A moment later the whole boat suddenly rang like a
harp and Allnutt turned with a jump. The wire funnel-stay on the
starboard side had parted close above the gunwale; the long end hung
down by the funnel. Even as Allnutt noticed it there was a metallic
smack and two holes showed high up in the funnel. Rose had brought the
tiller over again, straightening the launch on her course after taking
the bend. Next moment Shona vanished behind the point, and Allnutt stood
shaking his fists in derision at the invisible enemy and shouting at the
top of his voice.

'Look after the engine!' screamed Rose.

They were flying along now, for the river was narrowing and its current
increasing with every yard. The wind could not reach the surface here,
between the cliffs. Most of the surface was smooth and sleek like
greased metal, but here and there were ominous furrows and ripples
betraying the hidden inequalities of its bed. Rose steered carefully
through the smooth water. She found she had to make ample allowance for
leeway now; so fast was the current that the boat went flying down
broadside on towards these obstructions in the course of the turn. There
was another bend close ahead, a very sharp one from all appearance. She
dragged the tiller across; she found she was not satisfied with her
field of view ahead, and leaped up on to the bench, holding the tiller
down by her right knee. With her left hand she reached up and tore the
rotten canvas awning from its stanchions. They neither of them noticed
the last two shots which the German captain of reserve fired at them at
this moment.

The _African Queen_ slithered round the corner, and lurched and rolled
and heaved as she encountered the swirls which awaited her there. But
the steady thrust of her screw carried her through them; that was
Allnutt's job, to see that the launch had steerage way to take her
through the eddies and to enable Rose to steer some sort of course with
the following current.

There were rocks in the channel now, with white water boiling round
them, and Rose saw them coming up towards her with terrifying rapidity.
There was need for instant decision in picking the right course, and yet
Rose could not help noticing, even in that wild moment, that the water
had lost its brown colour and was now a clear glassy green. She pulled
the tiller over and the rocks flashed by. Lower down, the channel was
almost obstructed by rocks. She saw a passage wide enough for the boat
and swung the bows into it. Stretching down before her there was a long
green slope of racing water. And even as the _African Queen_ heaved up
her stern to plunge down it she saw at the lower end of the fairway a
wicked black rock just protruded above the surface--it would rip the
whole bottom out of the boat if they touched it. She had to keep the
boat steady on her course for a fraction of a second until the channel
widened a trifle, and then fling herself on the tiller to swing her
over. The boat swayed and rocked, and wriggled like a live thing as she
brought the tiller back again to straighten her out. For a dreadful
second it seemed as if the eddy would defeat her efforts, but the engine
stuck to its work and the kick of the propeller forced the boat through
the water. They shaved through the gap with inches to spare, and the
bows lurched as Rose fought with the tiller and they swung into the
racing eddies at the tail of the rapid. Next moment they had reached the
comparative quiet of the deep fast reach below, and Rose had time to
sweep the streaming sweat from her face with the back of her left
forearm.

All the air was full of spray and of the roar of rushing water, whose
din was magnified by the cliffs close at either side. The sound was
terrifying to Allnutt, and so were the lurches and lunges of the boat,
but he had no time to look about him. He was far too busy keeping the
engine running. He knew, even better than did Rose, that their lives
depended on the propeller giving them steerage way. He had to keep the
steam pressure well up and yet well below danger point; he had to work
the feed pump; he had to keep the engine lubricated. He knew that they
would be lost if he had to stop the engine, even for a second. So he
bent to his work with panic in his soul while the boat beneath his feet
leaped and bucked and lurched worse than any restive horse, and while
out of the tail of his eye he could glimpse rocks flashing past with a
speed which told him how great was their own velocity.

'Our Father which art in Heaven,--' said Allnutt to himself, slamming
shut the furnace door. He had not prayed since he left his Board School.

It was only a few seconds before they reached the next rapid, like the
last a stretch of ugly rocks and boiling eddies and green inclined
slopes of hurtling water, where the eye had to be quick and the brain
quicker still, where the hand had to be steady and strong and subtle and
the will resolute. Half-way down the rapid there was a wild confusion of
tossing water in which the eye was necessarily slower in catching sight
of those rocks just awash whose touch meant death. Rose rode the mad
whirlwind like a Valkyrie. She was conscious of an elation and an
excitement such as only the best of her brother's sermons had ever
aroused. Her mind was working like a machine with delirious rapidity.
She forced the _African Queen_ to obey her will and weave a safe course
through the clustering dangers. The spray flew in sheets where the
currents conflicted.

Lower down still the river tore with incredible speed and without
obstruction along a narrow gorge walled in with vertical faces of rock.
To Rose, with a moment to think during this comparative inaction, it
seemed as if this must be almost as fine as travelling in a
motor-car--an experience she had never enjoyed but had often longed for.

It was only for a moment that she could relax, however, for close ahead
the gorge turned a corner, so sharply that it looked as if the river
plunged into the rock face, and Rose had to make ready for the turn and
brace herself to face whatever imminent dangers lay beyond out of sight.
She kept her eye on the rock at the water's edge on the inside of the
bend, and steered to pass it close. So the _African Queen_ was beginning
to turn just before she reached the bend, and it was as well that it was
so.

The sweep of the current took her over to the opposite bank as if she
were no more than a chip of wood, while Rose tugged at the tiller with
all her strength. The bows came round, but it looked for a space as if
her stern would be flung against the rocks. The propeller battled
against the current; the boat just held her own, and then as they
drifted down the backwash caught her and flung her out again into
mid-stream so that Rose had to force the tiller across like lightning,
and hardly were they straight than she had instantly to pick out a fresh
course through the rocks that studded the surface in flurries of white
foam.

Later she saw that Allnutt was trying to attract her attention. In the
roar of the rapids he could not make his voice reach her. He stood up
with one anxious eye still on his gauges, and he held up a billet of
wood, tapped it, and waved a hand to the shore. It was a warning that
fuel was running short, and fuel they must have. She nodded, although
the next moment she had to look away and peer ahead at the rocks. They
shot another series of rapids, and down another gorge, where, the
half-mile river compressed into fifty yards, they seemed to be
travelling at the speed of a train. It was becoming vitally urgent that
they should find somewhere to stop, but nowhere in that lightning six
miles was there a chance of mooring. Allnutt was standing up brandishing
his billet of wood again. Rose waved him impatiently aside. She was as
much aware of the urgency of the situation as he was; there was no need
for these continued demonstrations. They ran on, with Rose doggedly at
the tiller.

Then she saw what she wanted. Ahead a ridge of rocks ran almost across
the stream, only broken in the centre, where the water piled up and
burst through the gap in a vast green hump. Below the wings of this
natural dam there was clear water--an absence of obvious rocks, at
least; each corner was a circling foam-striped eddy. She put the
_African Queen_ at the gap. She reared up as she hit the piled-up water,
put down her nose and heaved up her stern, and shot down the slope. At
the foot were high green waves, each one quite stationary, and each one
hard and unyielding. The launch hit them with a crash. Green water came
boiling over the short deck forward and into the boat. Anyone with less
faith than Rose would have thought that the _African Queen_ was doomed
to put her nose deeper and deeper while the torrent thrust against the
up-heaved stern until she was overwhelmed. But at the last possible
moment she lurched and wallowed and shook herself loose like some fat
pig climbing out of a muddy pond. And even as she came clear Rose was
throwing her weight on the tiller, her mind a lightning calculating
machine juggling with currents and eddies. The launch came round, hung
steady as the tiller went back, shot forward in one eddy, nosed her way
into another.

'Stop!' shrieked Rose. Her voice cut like a knife through the din of the
fall, and Allnutt, dazed, obeyed.

It was nicely calculated. The launch's residual way carried her through
the edge of the eddy into the tiny strip of quite slack water under the
lip of the dam. She came up against this natural pier with hardly a
bump, and instantly a shaking Allnutt was fastening painters to rocks,
half a dozen of them, to make quite sure, while the _African Queen_ lay
placid in the one bit of still water. Close under her stern the furious
Ulanga boiled over the ridge; downstream it broke in clamour round a new
series of rocks. Above the dam it chafed at its banks and roared against
the rocks which Rose had just avoided. All about them was frantic noise;
the air was filled with spray, but they were at peace.

'Coo!' said Allnutt, looking about them. Even he did not hear the word
as he said it.

And Rose found herself weak at the knees, and with an odd empty feeling
in her stomach, and with such an aching, overwhelming need to relieve
herself that she did not care if Allnutt saw her doing so or not.

One reaction followed another rapidly in their minds, but despite their
weariness and hunger they were both of them conscious of a wild
exhilaration. No one could spend half a day shooting rapids without
exhilaration. There was a sense of achievement which affected even
Allnutt. He was garrulous with excitement. He chattered volubly to Rose,
although she could not hear a word he said, and he smiled and nodded and
gesticulated, filled with a most unusual sense of well-being. This deep
gorge was cool and pleasant. Up above, trees grew to the very edge of
the cliffs, so that the light which came down to them was largely
filtered through their leaves and was green and restful. For once they
were out of the sweltering heat and glare of Africa. There were no
insects. There was no fear of discovery by the Germans.

With a shock Allnutt suddenly realized that only that morning they had
been under fire; it seemed like weeks ago. He had to look round at the
dangling funnel-stay to confirm his memory, and automatically he went
over to it and set himself to splice the broken wire. With that, the
work of the boat got under way once more. Rose set up that wicked old
hand pump and began to free the boat of the water which had come in; it
slopped over the floor-boards as they moved. But pumping in that restful
coolness was not nearly as irksome as pumping on the glaring upper
river. Even the pump, which one might have thought to be beyond
reformation, was better behaved.

Allnutt climbed out of the boat in search of fuel, and any doubts as to
the possibility of finding wood in the gorge were soon dispelled. There
was driftwood in plenty. On shelves in the steep cliff past floods had
left wood in heaps, much of it the dry friable kind which best suited
the _African Queen_'s delicate digestion. Allnutt brought loads of it
down to the boat, and to eke out its supply the slack water above the
shore end of the dam was thick with sticks and logs brought down from
above and caught up here. Allnutt fished out a great mass of it and left
it to drain on the steep rocky side; by next morning it would be ready
for use in the furnace if helped out with plenty of the dry stuff.

Rose had in fact been really fortunate in finding the _African Queen_
ready to her hand. The steam launch with all its defects possessed a
self-contained mobility denied to any other method of transport. No gang
of carriers in the forest could compare with her. Had she been fitted
with an internal combustion engine she could not have carried sufficient
liquid fuel for two days' running. As it was, taking her water supply
from over-side and sure of finding sufficient combustibles on shore she
was free of the two overwhelming difficulties which at that very moment
were hampering the _Emden_ in the Indian Ocean and were holding the
_Knigsberg_ useless and quiescent in the Rufiji delta. Regarded as the
captain of a raiding cruiser Rose was happily situated. She had overcome
her difficulties with her crew, and the stock of provisions heaped up in
the bows showed as yet hardly a sign of diminution. She had only
navigational difficulties to contend with; difficulties represented by
the rocks and the rapids of the lower Ulanga.

For the present neither Rose nor Allnutt cared about navigational
difficulties in the future. They were content with what they had done
that day. Nor did they moralize about the _African Queen_'s peculiar
advantages. The everlasting roar of water in their ears was unfavourable
to continuous thought and rendered conversation quite impossible. They
could only grin at each other to indicate their satisfaction, and eat
enormously, and swill tea in vast mugs with lots of condensed milk and
sugar--Rose found herself craving for sugar after the excitement of the
day, and, significantly enough, made no effort to combat the craving.
She had forgotten at the moment that any desire of the body should be
suspect and treated as an instigation of the devil.

Freedom and responsibility and an open-air life and a foretaste of
success were working wonders on her. She had spent ten years in Africa,
but those ten years, immured in a dark bungalow, with hardly anyone save
Samuel to talk to, had no more forwarded her development than ten years
in a nunnery would have done. She had lived in subjection all her life,
and subjection offers small scope to personality. And no woman with
Rose's upbringing could live for ten days in a small boat with a
man--even a man like Allnutt--without broadening her ideas and smoothing
away the jagged corners and making of her something more like a human
being. These last ten days had brought her into flower.

Those big breasts of hers, which had begun to sag when she had begun to
lapse into spinsterhood, were firm and upstanding now again, and she
could look down on them swelling out the bosom of her white drill frock
without misgiving. Even in these ten days her body had done much towards
replacing fat where fat should be and eliminating it from those areas
where it should not. Her face had filled out, and though there were
puckers round her eyes caused by the sun they went well with her healthy
tan and lent piquancy to the ripe femininity of her body. She drank her
tea with her mouth full in a way which would have horrified her a month
back.

When their stomachs were full the excitement and fatigue of the day
began to take effect. Their eyelids began to droop and their heads began
to nod even as they sat with their dishes on their knees. The delicious
coolness of the gorge played its part. Down between those lofty cliffs
darkness came imperceptibly; they were once more in a land where there
was twilight. Rose actually found herself nodding off fast asleep while
Allnutt was putting the dishes away. The tremendous din of the water all
round her was hardly noticed by her weary ears. For three nights now she
had slept very badly in consequence of worrying about Allnutt. She felt
now that she had nothing more to worry about; although the fire of her
mission still burned true and strong she was supremely content. She
smiled as she composed herself to sleep, and she smiled as she slept, to
the blaring song of the Ulanga.

And Allnutt snuggled down on the boxes of explosives in a similar
condition of beautiful haziness. What with fatigue and natural
disability and the roar of the river he was in no condition for
continuous thought, and the night before had been sleepless because of
Rose's treatment of him. It was astonishing that it should only be the
night before. It seemed more like a childish memory. After that had been
settled they had come down past Shona. Coo, they had sucked the old
Germans in proper. The poor beggars hadn't thought of shooting at them
until they were past the town. Bet they were surprised to see the old
_African Queen_ come kiting past. They hadn't believed anyone would try
to get down those gorges. Didn't believe nobody could. Well, this'd show
'em. Allnutt smiled too, in company with Rose, as he slid off into sleep
to the music of the Ulanga.

It is a pretty problem of psychology to decide why Allnutt should have
found a little manhood--not much, but a little--in Rose's society, among
the broad reaches of the Ulanga, and in the roaring gorges, and under
the fire of the German Askaris, when it had been so long denied him in
the slums of his youth, and the stokeholds and the engine-rooms and
brothels, and the easy-going condescension of the white men's mess of
the Ulanga Goldfields. The explanation may lie in the fact that Allnutt
in this voyage so far had just sufficient experience of danger to give
him a taste for it so that he liked it while he hated it, paradoxically.
Surfeit was yet to come.




CHAPTER SEVEN


It almost seemed, next morning, as if surfeit had come already. To look
back on dangers past is a very different thing from looking forward to
dangers close at hand and still to come. Allnutt looked at the roaring
water of the fall, and at the rocky cataract which they would have to
negotiate next, and he was frightened. There was an empty sick feeling
in his stomach and a curious feeling of pins and needles down the backs
of his legs and in the soles of his feet. The next fifty yards, even,
might find the boat caught on those rocks and battered to pieces, while
he and Rose were beaten down by the racing current, crushed and drowned.
He almost felt the strangling water at his nostrils as he thought about
it. He had no appetite at all for breakfast.

But there was a vague comfort in the knowledge that there was nothing
for them to do save go on. If they stayed where they were they would
starve when their provisions came to an end. The only possible route to
anywhere lay down the gorge. And the din of the water made it hard to
think clearly. Allnutt got up steam in the boiler, and heaped the boat
with fuel, and untied the painters, with a feeling of unreality, as if
all this was not really happening to him, although it was unpleasant.

Rose got up on to her seat and took the tiller. She studied the eddies
of the pool in which they lay; she looked down the cataract which
awaited them. There was no fear in her at all. The flutter of her bosom
was caused by elation and excitement--the mere act of taking hold of the
tiller started her heart beating faster. She gave directions to Allnutt
by means of signs; a wave of her hand over-side and Allnutt pushed off
cautiously with the boat-hook; she beckoned him to her and he put the
engine into reverse for a revolution or two, just enough to get the bows
clear. She watched the swirls and the slow motion of the launch backward
towards the fall. Then she waved with a forward motion, and Allnutt
started the propeller turning. The _African Queen_ gathered slow
headway, while the shaft vibrated underfoot. Rose brought the tiller
over; the launch circled in the eddy, lurched into the main stream, the
next moment was flying down with the current, and the madness of the day
had begun.

That ability to think like lightning descended upon Rose's mind as they
reached the main stream. She threaded her way through the rocks of the
cataract as if it were child's play. It had become child's play to watch
the banked-up white water round the rocks, to calculate the speed of the
current and the boat's speed through the water, when to start the turn
and what allowance to make for the rebound of the water from the rock
they were passing in planning their approach to the next. The big
stationary wave which marked an under-water rock was noted
subconsciously. Mechanically she decided how close to it she could go
and what the effect of the eddy would be.

Later, when the descent of the river was completed, Rose found she could
not remember the details of that second day among the rapids with half
the clearness of the first day. Those first rapids were impressed upon
her memory with perfect faithfulness; she could remember every bend,
every rock, every eddy; she could visualize them just by closing her
eyes. But the memories of the second day were far more jumbled and
vague. Rose only remembered clearly that first cataract. The subsequent
ones remained in her mind only as long sequences of roaring white water.
There was spray which wetted her face, and there were some nasty
corners--how many she could not tell. Her mind had grown accustomed to
it all.

Yet the elation remained. There was sheer joy in crashing through those
waves. Rose, with never a thought that the frail fabric of the _African
Queen_ might be severely tried by some of those jolts and jars, found it
exhilarating to head the launch into the stiff rigid waves which marked
the junction of two currents, and to feel her buck and lurch under her,
and to see the spray come flying back from the bows. The finest
sensation of all now was the heave upwards of the stern as the _African
Queen_ reached the summit of one of those long deep descents of green
water and went racing down it with death on either hand and destruction
seemingly awaiting them below.

Towards afternoon there was a cessation of cataracts. The river widened
a trifle, but the walls of the gorge, although not quite so high,
remained nearly vertical still. Between these walls the river raced with
terrific velocity, but without impediment. There was time now to think
and to enjoy oneself, to revel in the thrill of sending the _African
Queen_ skating round the corners, pushed far out by the current until
the outside bank was perilously close to one's elbow. Even Allnutt,
noticing the sudden smoothness of the passage, suspended his rigid
concentration over the engines and raised his head. He watched in
amazement the precipices flashing by at either hand, and he marvelled at
the dizzy way they slithered round the bends. There was something
agonizingly pleasant about it. The feeling of constriction about the
breast which he felt as he watched gave him an odd sense of
satisfaction. He was full of the pride of achievement.

The mooring place which they desired presented itself along this
cataract-free portion of the river. A tributary to the Ulanga came in
here--not in any conventional way, but by two bold leaps down the
precipice, to plunge bodily into the water after a forty-foot drop. Rose
just had time to notice it, to steer clear and be drenched by the spray,
when she saw that a sudden little widening of the channel just below,
where the current had eaten away the rocky bank at a spot where the rock
was presumably softer, offered them the assistance of a back eddy in
mooring. She called to attract Allnutt's attention, signalled for
half-speed and then for reverse. Allnutt's boat-hook helped in the
manoeuvre, and the _African Queen_ came gently to a stop under the steep
bank. Allnutt made fast the boat while Rose looked about her.

'How lovely!' said Rose, involuntarily.

She had not noticed the loveliness before; all that had caught her
attention had been the back eddy. They had moored in what must have been
one of the loveliest corners of Africa. The high banks here were not
quite precipices, and there were numerous shelves in the rock bearing
blue and purple flowering plants, which trailed shimmering wreaths down
the steep faces. From the crest down to flood level the rock face was
covered with the mystic blue of them. Higher upstream was the spot where
the little tributary came foaming down the cliff face. A beam of
sunlight reached down over the edge of the gorge and turned its spray
into a dancing rainbow. The noise of its fall was not deafening; to ears
grown used to the roar of the Ulanga cataracts it was just a pleasant
musical accompaniment to the joyful singing of the calm rapid river
here. Under the rocky bank it was cool and delicious with the clear
green river coursing alongside. The rocks were reds and browns and greys
where they could be seen through the flowers, and had a smooth
well-washed appearance. There was no dust; there were no flies. It was
no hotter than a summer noon in England.

Rose had never before found pleasure in scenery, just as scenery. Samuel
never had. If as a girl some bluebell wood in England (perhaps Rose had
never seen a bluebell wood; it is possible) had brought a thrill into
her bosom and a catch into her throat she would have viewed such
symptoms with suspicion, as betokening a frivolity of mind verging upon
wantonness. Samuel was narrow and practical about these things.

But Rose was free now from Samuel and his joyless, bilious outlook; it
was a freedom all the more insidious because she was not conscious of
it. She stood in the stern and drank in the sweet beauty of it all,
smiling at the play of colour in the rainbow at the waterfall. Her mind
played with memories, of the broad sun-soaked reaches of the upper
Ulanga, of the cataracts and dangers they had just passed.

There was further happiness in that. There was a thrill of achievement.
Rose knew that in bringing the _African Queen_ down those rapids she had
really accomplished something, something which in her present mood she
ranked far above any successful baking of bread, or even (it is to be
feared) any winning of infidel souls to righteousness. For once in her
joyless life she could feel pleased with herself, and it was a sensation
intoxicating in its novelty. Her body seethed with life.

Allnutt came climbing back into the boat from the shore. He was limping
a little.

'D'you mind 'aving a look at my foot, miss?' he said. 'Got a splinter in
it up on the bank an' I dunno if it's all out.'

'Of course,' said Rose.

He sat up on the bench in the stern, and made to take off his canvas
shoe, but Rose was beforehand with him. On her knees she slipped the
shoe off and took his slender, rather appealing foot into her hands. She
found the place of entry of the splinter, and pressed it with her
finger-tip while Allnutt twitched with ridiculous ticklishness. She
watched the blood come back again.

'No, there's nothing there now,' she said, and let his foot go. It was
the first time she had touched him since they had left the mission.

'Thank you, miss,' said Allnutt.

He lingered on the bench gazing up at the flowers, while Rose lingered
on her knees at his feet.

'Coo, ain't it pretty,' said Allnutt. There was a little awe in his
tone, and his voice was hardly raised loud enough to be heard above the
sound of the river.

The long twenty-four hours spent in the echoing turmoil of the cataracts
seemed to have muddled their thoughts. Neither of them was thinking
clearly. Both of them felt oddly happy and companionable, and yet at the
same time they were conscious that something was missing, although they
felt it close at hand. Rose watched Allnutt's face as he looked
wondering round him. There was something appealing, almost childlike,
about the little man with his dazed smile. She wanted to pet him, and
then, noticing this desire in herself, she put it aside as not
expressing exactly what it was she wanted, although she could find no
better words for it. Both of them were breathing harder than usual, as
though undergoing some strain.

'That waterfall there,' said Allnutt, hesitatingly, 'reminds me--'

He never said of what it reminded him. He looked down at Rose beside
him, her sweet bosom close to him. He, too, was glowing with life and
inspired by the awesome beauty of the place. He did not know what he was
doing when he put out his hand to her throat, sunburned and cool. Rose
caught at his hands, to hold them, not to put them away, and he came
down to his knees and their bodies came together.

Rose was conscious of kisses, of her racing pulse and her swimming head.
She was conscious of hands which pulled at her clothing and which she
could not deny if she would. She was conscious of pain which made her
put up her arms round Allnutt's slight body and press him to her,
holding him to her breasts while he did his will--her will--upon her.




CHAPTER EIGHT


Probably it had all been inevitable. They had been urged into it by all
their circumstances--their solitude, their close proximity, the dangers
they had encountered, their healthy life. Even their quarrels had
helped. Rose's ingrained prudery had been drastically eradicated during
these days of living in close contact with a man, and it was that
prudery which had constituted the main barrier between them. There is no
room for false modesty or physical shame in a small boat.

Rose was made for love; she had been ashamed of it, frightened of it,
once upon a time, and had averted her eyes from the truth, but she could
not maintain that suppression amid the wild beauty of the Ulanga. And
once one started making allowances for Allnutt he became a likeable
little figure. He was no more responsible for his deficiencies than a
child would be. His very frailties had their appeal for Rose. It must
have been that little gesture of his in coming to her with a splinter in
his foot which broke down the last barrier of Rose's reserve. And she
wanted to give, and to give again, and to go on giving; it was her
nature.

There was not even the difficulty of differences of social rank
interposed between them. Clergyman's sister notwithstanding, there was
no denying that Rose was a small tradesman's daughter. Allnutt's Cockney
accent was different from her own provincial twang, but it did not grate
on her nerves. She had been accustomed for much of her life to meet upon
terms of social equality people with just as much accent. If Allnutt and
Rose had met in England and decided to marry, Rose's circle might not
have thought she was doing well for herself, but they would not have
looked upon her as descending more than a single step of the social
ladder at most.

Most important factor of all, perhaps, was the influence of the doctrine
of the imperfection of man (as opposed to woman) which Rose had imbibed
all through her girlhood. Her mother, her aunts, all the married women
she knew, had a supreme contempt for men regarded in the light of
house-inhabiting creatures. They were careless, and clumsy, and untidy.
They were incapable of dusting a room or cooking a joint. They were
subject to fits of tantrums. Women had to devote themselves to clearing
their path for them and smoothing their way. Yet at the same time it was
a point of faith that these incomprehensible creatures were the lords of
creation for whom nothing could be too good. For them the larger portion
of the supper haddock must always be reserved. For them on Sunday
afternoons one must step quietly lest their nap be disturbed. Their
trivial illnesses must be coddled, their peevish complaints heard with
patience, their bad tempers condoned. In fact--perhaps it is the
explanation of this state of affairs--men were, in their inscrutable
oddity, and in the unquestioned deference accorded them, just like
miniatures of the exacting and all-powerful God whom the women
worshipped.

So Rose did not look for perfection in the man she loved. She took it
for granted that she would not respect him. He would not be so dear to
her if she did. If, as to her certain knowledge he did, he got drunk and
was not enamoured of a prospect of personal danger, that was only on a
par with her father's dyspeptic malignity, or Uncle Albert's habit of
betting, or Samuel's fits of cold ill temper. It was not a question of
knowing all and forgiving all, but of knowing all except that she was
entitled to forgive. And these very frailties of his made an insidious
appeal to the maternal part of her, and so did his corporal frailty, and
the hard luck he had always experienced. She yearned for him in a way
which differed from and reinforced the clamourings of her emancipated
body. As the flame of passion died down in him, and, with his lips to
her rich throat, he murmured a few odd sleepy words to her, she was very
happy, and cradled him in her strong arms.

Allnutt was very happy too. Whatever he might do in the heat of passion,
his need was just as much for a mother as for a mistress. To him there
was a comfort in Rose's arms he had never known before. He felt he could
trust her and depend on her as he had never trusted nor depended upon a
woman in his life. All the misery and tension of his life dropped away
from him as he pillowed his head on her firm bosom.

Sanity did not come to them until morning, and not until late morning at
that, and when it came it was only a partial sort of sanity. There was a
moment in the early morning light when Rose found herself blushing at
the memory of last night's immodesties, and filled with disquiet at the
thought of her unmarried condition, but Allnutt's lips were close to
hers, and her arms were about his slender body, and there was red blood
in her veins, and memories and disquietude alike vanished as she caught
him to her. There was a blushing interval when she had to own that she
did not know his name, and, when he told her, shyly, she savoured the
name 'Charlie' over to herself like a schoolgirl, and she thought it a
very nice name, too.

When the yearning for the morning cup of tea became quite
uncontrollable--and after a night of love Rose found herself aching for
tea just as much as after a day's cataract-running--it was she who
insisted on rising and preparing breakfast. That 'better portion of the
haddock' convention worked strongly on her. She had not minded in the
least having meals prepared by Allnutt her assistant, but it seemed
wrong to her that Charlie (whom already she called 'husband' to herself,
being quite ignorant of the word 'lover') should be bothered with
domestic details. She felt supremely pleased and flattered when he
insisted on helping her; she positively fluttered. And she laughed
outright when he cracked a couple of jokes.

All the same, and in a fashion completely devoid of casuistry, Rose was
appreciative of the difference between business and pleasure. When
breakfast was finished she took control of the expedition again without
a second thought. She took it for granted that they were going on, and
that in the end they were going to torpedo the _Knigin Luise_, and it
did not occur to Allnutt that now that he occupied a privileged position
he might take advantage of it to protest. He was a man simply made to be
henpecked. What with the success they had met with under Rose's command
up to now, and with the events of the night, Rose's ascendancy over him
was complete. He was quite happy to cast all the responsibility on to
her shoulders and to await philosophically whatever destiny might send.
He gathered fuel and he got up steam with the indifference engendered by
routine.

Only when they were on the point of departure did either of them waver.
Rose found him close beside her murmuring in a broken voice--

'Give us another kiss, old girl.'

And Rose put her arms round him and kissed him, and whispered--'Charlie,
Charlie, dear Charlie.' She patted his shoulder, and she looked round at
the beauty all about them, where she had given him her virginity, and
her eyes were wet. Then they cast off, and Allnutt pushed off with the
boat-hook, and a second later they were in the mad riot of the Ulanga
once more, coursing down between the precipices.

In some moment of sensible conversation that morning Allnutt had
advanced the suggestion that the last cataract had been left behind and
this portion of the river was merely the approach to the flat land round
the Lake. He proved to be wrong. After ten wild minutes of smooth water
the familiar din of an approaching cataract reached Rose's ears. There
was need to brace herself once more, to hold the tiller steady, and to
stare forward to pick out the continuous line of clear water, a winding
one to avoid the rocks, and yet with no turn in it too sharp, which it
was necessary to select in the few fleeting seconds between the sighting
of the cataract and the moment when the _African Queen_ began to heave
among the first waves of the race.

So they went on down the wild river, deafened and drenched. Amazingly
they survived each successive peril, although it was too much to hope
that their luck would hold. They came to a place where the channel was
too narrow and obstructed to offer in its whole width a single inch of
clear water. Rose could only pick the point where the wild smoother foam
was lowest, and try to judge from the portions of the rocks exposed what
course was taken by the water that boiled between them. The _African
Queen_ reared up and crashed into the tangle of meeting waves. She shook
with the impact; water flew back high over the top of the funnel. Rose
saw clear water ahead, and then as the launch surged through there was a
crash beneath her, followed by a horrid vibration which seemed as if it
would rattle the boat into pieces. With the instinct of the engineer
Allnutt shut off steam.

'Keep her _going_, Charlie!' screamed Rose.

Allnutt opened the throttle a trifle. The devastating vibration began
again, but apparently the propeller still revolved. The _African Queen_
retained a little steerage way, while Allnutt prayed that the bottom
would not be wrenched out of the boat. Rose, looking over the side, saw
that they were progressing slowly through the water, while the current
hurried them on at its usual breakneck speed. She could tell that it was
vitally urgent that they should stop as soon as may be, but they were
faced with the eternal problem of finding a mooring place in the narrow
gorge with its tearing current. Certainly they must find one before the
next cataract. With that small speed through the water she would never
be able to steer the _African Queen_ down a cataract; moreover, swinging
the tiller experimentally, she found that something was seriously wrong
with the steering. The propeller had a tendency now to swing the boat
round crabwise, and it called for a good deal of rudder to counteract
it. The cliffs streamed by on either side, while the clattering
vibration beneath her seemed to grow worse, and she fought to keep the
boat in mid-current. A long way ahead she could see the familiar dark
rocks rearing out of the river, ringed at the base with foam. They
_must_ moor. Down on the left a big rock jutting out into the river
offered them a tiny bit of shelter in the angle below it.

'Charlie!' she screamed above the roar of the river.

He heard her and understood her gesticulations. The operation had to be
timed to perfection. If they turned too soon they would be dashed on to
the rock; if they turned too late they would miss the opportunity and
would be swept, stern first and helpless, down the cataract. Rose had to
make allowance for the changed speed of the boat, for this new twisting
effect of the screw, for the acceleration of the current as it neared
the cataract. With her lips compressed she put the tiller across and
watched the bows anxiously as the boat came round.

It was too much to hope that the manoeuvre would be completely
successful. The bow came up behind the rock true enough, but the turn
was not complete. The launch still lay partly across the river as her
bow grounded in the angle. Instantly she heeled and rolled. A mass of
water came boiling in over the gunwale. The boiler fire was extinguished
in a wild flurry of steam whose crackling was heard above the confusion
of other sounds.

Allnutt it was who saved the situation. Grabbing the painter he leaped
like an athlete, in a split second of time, nearly waist-deep in a
swirling eddy, and he got his shoulder under the bows and heaved like a
Hercules. The bows slid off and the boat righted herself, wallowing
three-quarters full of water; the tug of the current instantly began to
take her downstream. Allnutt leaped up the face of the rock, still
clutching the painter. He braced himself against the strain. His
shoulder joints cracked as the rope tightened. His feet slipped, but he
recovered himself. With another Herculean effort he made time for
himself to get a purchase with the rope round an angle of the rock, and
braced himself again. Slowly the boat swung in to shore, and the strain
eased as the eddy began to balance the current. Five seconds later she
was safe, just fitting into the little eddy behind the rock, as full of
water as she could be without sinking, while Allnutt made painter after
painter fast to the shore, and Rose still stood on the bench in the
stern, the water slopping about below her feet. She managed to smile at
him; she was feeling a little sick and faint now that it was over. The
memory of that green wave coming in over the gunwale still troubled her.
Allnutt sat down on a rock and grinned back at her.

'We nearly done it that time,' he said; she could not catch the words
because of the noise of the river, but clearly he was not discomposed.

Allnutt was acquiring a taste for riverine dangers--rapid-running can
become as insidious a habit as morphine-taking--apart from his new
happiness in Rose's society. Rose sat on the gunwale and kept her feet
out of the water. She would not let her weakness be seen; she forced
herself to be matter of fact. Allnutt swung himself on board.

'Coo, what a mess!' he said.' Wonder 'ow much we've lost.'

'Let's get this water out and see,' said Rose.

Allnutt splashed down into the waist and fished about for the bailer. He
found it under the bench and handed it to Rose. He took the big basin
out of the locker for himself. Before Rose got down to start bailing she
tucked her skirt up into her underclothes as though she were a little
girl at the seaside--the sensation of intimacy with Charlie, combating
piquantly with her modesty, was extraordinarily pleasant.

The basin and the bailer between them soon lowered the level of the
water in the boat; it was not long before Rose was getting out the
wicked old hand pump so as to pump out what remained under the
floor-boards.

''Ere, I'll do that, Rosie,' said Allnutt.

'No, you sit down and rest yourself,' said Rose. 'And mind you don't
catch cold.'

Pumping out the boat was about the nearest approach to dusting a room
which could be found in their domestic life. Naturally it was not a
man's work.

'First question is,' said Allnutt, as the pumping drew to a close, ''ow
much does she leak?'

They pumped until the pump brought up no more water while Allnutt
addressed himself to getting up a couple of floor-boards in the waist. A
wait of half an hour revealed no measurable increase in the bilge.

'Coo blimey,' said Allnutt. 'That's better than we could 'ave 'oped for.
We 'aren't lorst nothing as far as I can see, an' we 'aven't damaged 'er
skin worth mentioning. I should 'ave fort there'd 'a been a 'ole in 'er
somewheres after what she's been through.'

'What was all that clattering just before we stopped?' asked Rose.

'We still got to find that out, old girl,' said Allnutt.

There was a cautious sympathy in his voice. He feared the very worst,
and he knew what it would mean in disappointment to Rose. He had already
looked up the side of the ravine, and found a small comfort in the fact
that it was just accessible. If the _African Queen_ was as much disabled
as he feared they would have to climb up there and wander in the forest
until the Germans found them--or until they starved to death. It said
much for his new-found manliness that he kept out of his voice the
doubts that he felt.

'How are you going to do that, dear?' asked Rose.

Allnutt looked at the steep bank against which they were lying, and at
the gentle eddy alongside.

'I'll 'ave to go underneath an' look,' said he. 'There ain't no other
wye, not 'ere.'

The bank was steep-to. There was four feet of water on the shore side of
the boat, six feet on the river side, as Allnutt measured it with the
boat-hook.

''Ere goes,' said Allnutt, pulling off his singlet and his trousers.
They were wet through already, but it runs counter to a man's instincts
to immerse himself in water with his clothes on.

'You stay 'andy wiv that rope, case there's a funny current darn at the
bottom.'

Rose, looking anxiously over the side, saw his naked body disappear
under the bottom of the boat. His feet stayed in view and kicked
reassuringly. Then they grew more agitated as Allnutt thrust himself out
from under again. He stood on the rocky bottom beside the boat, the
water streaming from his hair.

'Did you see anything, dear?' asked Rose, hovering anxiously over him.

'Yerss,' answered Allnutt. He said no more until he had climbed back
into the boat; he wanted time to compose himself. Rose sat beside him
and waited. She put out her dry hand and clasped his wet one.

'Shaft's bent to blazes. Like a corkscrew,' said Allnutt, dully. 'An'
there's a blade gone off the prop.'

Rose could only guess at the magnitude of the disaster from the tone he
used, and she underestimated it.

'We'll have to mend it then,' she said.

'Mend it?' said Allnutt. He laughed bitterly. Already in imagination he
and Rose were wandering through the forest, sick and starving. Rose was
silent before the savage despondency of his tone.

'Must 'a' just 'it a rock with the tip of the prop,' went on Allnutt,
more to himself than her. 'There ain't nothink to notice on the
deadwood. Christ only knows 'ow the shaft 'eld on while we was getting
in 'ere. Like a bloody corkscrew.'

'Never mind, dear,' said Rose. The use of the words 'Christ' and
'bloody' seemed so oddly natural here, up against primitive facts, that
she hardly noticed them, any more than she noticed Charlie's nakedness.
'Let's get everything dry, and have some dinner, and then we can talk
about it.'

She could not have given better advice. The simple acts of hanging
things to dry, and getting out greasy tins from the boxes of stores,
went far to soothe Allnutt's jangled nerves. Later, with a meal inside
him, and strong tea making a hideous mixture in his stomach with bully
beef, he felt better still. Rose returned then to the vital issue.

'What shall we have to do before we go on?' she asked.

'I'll tell you what we could do,' said Allnutt, 'if we 'ad a workshop,
an' a landin' slip, an' if the parcel post was to call 'ere. We could
pull this old tub out on the slip and take the shaft down. Then we might
be able to forge it straight agine. I dunno if we could, though, 'cause
I ain't no blacksmith. Then we could write to the makers an' get a new
prop. They might 'ave one in stock, 'cause this boat ain't over twenty
years old. While we was waitin' we might clean 'er bottom 'an paint 'er.
Then we could put in the shaft an' the new prop, an' launch 'er an' go
on as if nothink 'ad 'appened. But we 'aven't got nothink at all, an' so
we can't.'

Thoughts of the forest were still thronging in Allnutt's mind.

It was Rose's complete ignorance of all things mechanical which kept
them from lapsing into despair. Despite Allnutt's depression, she was
filled with a sublime confidence in his ability; after all, she had
never yet found him wanting in his trade. In her mind the problem of
getting a disabled steamboat to go again was quite parallel with, say,
the difficulties she would meet if she were suddenly called upon to run
a strange household whose womenfolk were down with sickness. She would
have to get to know where things were, and deal with strange tradesmen,
and accustom herself to new likes and dislikes on the part of the men.
But she would tackle the job in complete confidence, just as she would
any other household problem that might present itself. She might have to
employ makeshifts which she hated; so might Allnutt. In her own limited
sphere she did not know the word 'impossible'. She could not conceive of
a man finding anything impossible in his, as long as he was not
bothered, and given plenty to eat.

'Can't you get the shaft off without pulling the boat on shore?' she
asked.

'M'm. I dunno. I might,' said Allnutt. 'Means goin' under water an'
gettin' the prop off. _Could_ do it, p'raps.'

'Well, if you had the shaft up on shore you could straighten it.'

'You got a hope,' said Allnutt. 'Ain't got no hearth, ain't got no
anvil, ain't got no coal, ain't got nothink, an' I ain't no blacksmith,
like I said.'

Rose raked back in her memory for what she had seen of blacksmiths' work
in Africa.

'I saw a Masai native working once. He used charcoal. On a big hollow
stone. He had a boy to fan the charcoal.'

'Yerss, I seen that, too, but I'd use bellers myself,' said Allnutt.
'Make 'em easy enough.'

'Well, if you think that would be better--' said Rose.

''Ow d'you mike charcoal?' asked Allnutt. For the life of him, he could
not help entering into this discussion, although it still seemed to him
to be purely academic--'all moonshine', as he phrased it to himself.

'Charcoal?' said Rose vaguely. 'You set fire to great beehives of
stuff--wood, of course, how silly I am--and after it's burnt there's
charcoal inside. I've seen them do it somewhere.'

'We might try it,' said Allnutt. 'There's 'eaps an' 'eaps of driftwood
upon the bank.'

'Well, then--' said Rose, plunging more eagerly into the discussion.

It was not easy to convince Allnutt. All his shop training had given him
a profound prejudice against inexact work, experimental work,
hit-or-miss work. He had been spoiled by an education with exact tools
and adequate appliances; in the days of his apprenticeship mechanical
engineering had progressed far from the time when Stephenson thought it
a matter of self-congratulation that the 'Rocket's' pistons fitted her
cylinders with only half an inch to spare.

Yet all the same, flattered by Rose's sublime confidence in him, and
moved by the urgency of the situation, he gradually came round until he
was half disposed to try his hand on the shaft. Then suddenly he shied
away from the idea again. Like a fool, he had been forgetting the
difficulty which made the whole scheme pointless.

'No,' he said. 'It ain't no go, Rosie, old girl. I was forgetting that
prop. It ain't no go wiv a blade gone.'

'It got us along a bit just now,' said Rose.

'Yerss,' said Allnutt, 'but--'

He sighed with the difficulty of talking mechanics to an unmechanical
person.

'There's a torque,' he said. 'It ain't balanced--'

Any mechanic would have understood his drift at once. If a three-bladed
propeller loses a blade, there are two blades left on one-third of its
circumference, and nothing on the other two-thirds. All the resistance
to its rotation under water is consequently concentrated upon one small
section of the shaft, and a smooth revolution would be rendered
impossible. It would be bad enough for the engine, and what the effect
would be on a shaft fresh from the hands of an amateur blacksmith could
be better imagined than described. If it did not break it would soon be
like the corkscrew again of Allnutt's vivid simile. He did his best to
explain this to Rose.

'Well, you'll have to make another blade,' said Rose. 'There's lots of
iron and stuff you can use.'

'An' tie it on, I serpose?' said Allnutt. He could not help smiling when
his irony missed its mark altogether.

'Yes,' said Rose. 'If you think that will do. But couldn't you stick it
on, somehow? _Weld_ it. That's the right word, isn't it? Weld it on.'

'Coo lumme,' said Allnutt. 'You are a one, Rosie. Reely you are.'

Allnutt's imagination trifled with the idea of forging a propeller blade
out of scrap iron, and hand-welding it into position, and affixing this
botched propeller to a botched shaft, and then expecting the old
_African Queen_ to go. He laughed at the idea, laughed and laughed, so
that Rose had to laugh with him. Allnutt found it so amusing that for
the moment he forgot the seriousness of their position. Directly
afterwards they found themselves in each other's arms--how, neither of
them could remember--and they kissed as two people might be expected to
kiss on the second day of their honeymoon. They loved each other dearly,
and cares dropped away from them for a space. Yet all the same, while
Rose held Alnuttt in her arms, she reverted to the old subject.

'Why did you laugh like that when I spoke about welding?' she asked in
all seriousness. 'Wasn't it the right word after all? You know what I
mean, dear, even if it's not, don't you?'

'Crikey,' said Allnutt. 'Well, look here--'

There was no denying Rose; and Allnutt especially was not of the type to
deny her. Moreover, Allnutt's mercurial spirits could hardly help rising
under the influence of Rose's persistent optimism. The disaster they had
experienced would have cast him into unfathomable despair if she had not
been with him--despair, perhaps, which might have resulted in his not
raising a finger to help himself. As it was, the discussion ended
eventually, as was quite inevitable, in Allnutt's saying that 'he would
see what he could do,' just as some other uxorious husband in
civilization might see what could be done about buying a new
drawing-room suite. And from that first yielding grew the hard week's
work into which they plunged.

The first ray of hope came at the very beginning, when Allnutt, after
much toil under water, with bursting lungs, managed to get the propeller
off and out of the water. The missing blade had not broken off quite
short. It had left a very considerable stump, two inches or so. In
consequence it appeared more possible to bolt or fasten on a new
blade--the propeller, of course, was of bronze, and as the new blade
would have to be of iron, there could be no question of welding or
brazing. Allnutt put the propeller aside and devoted himself next to
getting the shaft free; if he could not repair that it was useless to
work on the propeller.

It was extraordinary what a prolonged business it was to free the shaft.
Partly this was because it called for two pairs of hands, one pair
inside the boat and one pair underneath the boat, and Rose had to be
instructed in the use of spanners, and a very comprehensive code of
signals had to be arranged so that Allnutt, crouching in the water
underneath the boat, could communicate his wishes to her.

The need for all these signals was only discovered by trial and error,
and there were maddening moments before they were fully workable.

That shaft was kinked in two places, close above and close below the
bracket which held it steady, two feet from where it emerged from the
glands, just above the propeller. There was no sliding it out through
these bearings in either direction, as Allnutt discovered after a couple
of trials. In consequence Allnutt had to work with spanner and
screwdriver under water, taking the whole bracket to pieces, and, seeing
that he had never set eyes on it in his life, and had to find out all
about it by touch, it was not surprising that it took a long time. He
would stand in the water beside the boat, his screwdriver in his hand
and his spanner in his belt, taking deep breaths, and then he would
plunge under, feel hastily for the bracket, and work on it for a few
fleeting seconds before his breath gave out and he had to come out
again.

The _African Queen_ was moored in moderately still water in the eddy
below the rock, but only a yard or two away there was a racing
seven-knot current tearing downstream, and occasionally some whim of the
water expressed itself in a fierce under-water swirl, which swung the
launch about and usually turned Allnutt upside down, holding on like
grim death in case the eddy should take him out into the main current
from which there would be no escape alive. It was in one of those swirls
that Allnutt dropped a screw, which was naturally irreplaceable and must
be recovered--it took a good deal of groping among the rocks beneath the
boat before he found it again.

Before he had finished Allnutt developed a surprising capacity for
holding his breath, and as a result of his prolonged immersions and
exposures, his skin peeled off in flakes all over him. It was an
important moment for Rose when at last, bending over the shaft in the
bottom of the boat, she saw it at last slide out through the glands, and
Allnutt emerged wet and dripping beside the boat with it in his hands.

Allnutt shook his head over the kinks and bends now revealed in the
light of day--the terminal one was nearly half a right-angle--but the
two of them set themselves doggedly to the business of forging the thing
straight again.

The sight of those kinks brought relief to Allnutt's mind in one
respect. The fact that the metal had bent instead of breaking revealed
that its temper was such that it might not suffer much from his amateur
blacksmith's work--Allnutt was very well aware that what he knew about
tempering was extraordinarily little. He comforted himself
philosophically by telling himself that after all he was not dealing
with a tool steel, and that obviously the shaft had a good deal of
reserve strength and that if he did not use extravagantly high
temperatures and if he annealed the thing cautiously he might not do too
much harm.

There was not the slightest chance of their using very high
temperatures, as they quickly discovered.

Their attempts at making charcoal were complete and utter failures. When
trying to reconstruct from memory what they had seen done they soon
discovered that they had seen with eyes unseeing. All they had to show
in return for several piles of wood were heaps of white ashes and a few
bits of what only a kindly person could possibly have called charcoal.
In desperation Allnutt resolved to try if he could not obtain a great
enough heat with a wood fire and bellows. He made the bellows neatly
enough with a couple of slabs of wood and inch or two of piping and a
pair of black elbow-length gloves which Rose had carried in her tin box
for ten years of Central Africa without wearing. When they found at last
a good shape for their hearth of piled rocks Allnutt was relieved to
discover that by energetic working of the bellows they could heat up
that unwieldy shaft until he could actually alter its shape with his
light hand hammer. They scorched themselves pretty well all over while
using the flaring inconsistent fuel, but all the same, the metal became
soft enough to work in a manner of speaking, and Allnutt was becoming
reconciled to makeshifts by now.

All the same, under the urging of the bellows, at which Rose worked
feverishly on her knees with scorched face, the open hearth consumed
wood at an incredible rate. It was not long before they had gathered in
every scrap of driftwood accessible in the ravine, and the work was as
yet hardly begun. They had to climb the steep face of the ravine into
the forest, and gather wood there. The heat was sweltering, they were
bitten by insects of all sorts, they wore themselves out and their
clothes into rags hacking paths through the undergrowth. No one on earth
could have climbed down that cliff face with a load of wood; they had to
drag the bundles to the verge and push them over the edge, and some fell
direct into the river, and one or two caught on inaccessible ledges and
were lost just as thoroughly although they were in sight, but they
managed to profit by about half the wood they collected in the forest.

Curiously enough, they were as happy as children during these days of
hectic work. Hard regular labour suited both of them, and as soon as
Allnutt had become infected by Rose's passion to complete the job they
had a common interest all day long. And every day there was the blessed
satisfaction of knocking off work in the late afternoon and revelling in
the feeling of comradely friendliness which drew them close together
until passion was aroused and hand went out to hand and lip met lip.
Rose had never known such happiness before nor perhaps had Allnutt
either. They could laugh and joke together; Rose had never laughed nor
joked like that in the whole thirty-three years of her existence. Her
father had taken shopkeeping as seriously as he (and her brother) had
taken religion. She had never realized before that friendliness and
merriment could exist along with a serious purpose in life any more than
she had realized that there was pleasure in the intercourse of the
sexes. There was something intensely satisfying in their companionship.

Little by little that propeller shaft was straightened. Patient heating
and patient hammering did their work. The major bends disappeared and
Allnutt turned his attention to the minor ones. He had to use a taut
string now to judge of the straightness of the shaft and he had to make
himself a gauge of wire for testing the diameter, so nearly true was it,
and there came a blessed morning when even his exacting mind was
satisfied, and he pronounced the shaft to be as good as he could make
it. He could lay it aside now, and turn his attention to the far more
difficult matter of the propeller blade.

In the end Allnutt made that new blade out of half a spare boiler tube.
The operations on the shaft had taught him a good deal of the practical
side of smith's work, and his experience with the propeller blade
practically completed his education. Under the urging of necessity, and
with the stimulus given him by Rose's confiding faith in his ability,
Allnutt devised all sorts of ways of dealing with that boiler tube; it
might almost be said that he re-invented some of his processes. He
welded one end into a solid plate, and he worked upon it and beat it and
shaped it until it gradually began to assume an appearance reminiscent
of the other two blades which were his models.

The ravine rang with the sound of his hammer. Rose was his diligent
assistant. She tended the fire, and worked the bellows, and, her hands
shielded with rags, held the nominally cool end of the tube under
Allnutt's instructions. Her nostrils were filled with the smell of
scorching cloth, and she burned her fingers over and over again and
nearly every single garment she and Allnutt possessed between them was
burned and torn until they gave up the hopeless pursuit after decency,
and she somehow enjoyed every minute of it.

There was intense interest in watching how the new blade took shape;
there were exciting discussions as to how this difficulty or that was to
be evaded. Allnutt found it all to his taste; there was gratification in
the primitive pleasure of making things with his own hands.

'If my old dad,' said Allnutt once, 'had put me to blacksmithing when I
was a kid, I don't think I should never have come to Africa. Coo! I
might still--'

Allnutt lost himself in a pictured fantasy of a London working-class
shopping district on a Saturday night, redolent with fried-fish shops,
garish with lights, and all a-bustle with people. He experienced a
little qualm of homesickness before he came back to real life again, to
the ravine with its pale red rocks, and the singing river, and the
dazzling light, and the _African Queen_ rocking in the eddy down below,
and Rose beside him.

'But then I shouldn't never have met you, Rosie, old girl,' he went on.
He fingered the embryo propeller blade. 'Nor done all this. It's worth
it. Every time it is, honest.'

Allnutt would not have exchanged Rose for all the fried-fish shops in
the world.

Later the propeller blade began to demand accurate measurement, so like
had it grown to its fellows. Allnutt had to invent gauges of intricate
shape to make sure that the curvature and contour of the old blades were
accurately reproduced, and before this part of the work was quite
completed he turned his attention to the other end and set to work to
forge a socket to fit over the broken stump, and to drilling holes by
which it might be made comparatively safe. The moment actually came at
last when the completed blade was slipped on over the stump, and Rose
was given a practical demonstration of riveting--Allnutt made the rivets
out of stumps of nails, and Rose had a trying time as 'holder-on';
neither spanner nor pincers were really effective tongs.

The new blade was in position now, an exact match of its fellows, and to
a casual inspection seemingly secure, but Allnutt was not yet satisfied.
He could appreciate the leverage exerted upon a propeller blade in swift
rotation, and the strain that would come upon the base--upon his
makeshift joint. At the risk of slightly reducing the propeller's
efficiency he joined all three blades together with a series of
triangles of wire strained taut. That would help to distribute the
strain round the whole propeller.

'That ought to do now,' said Allnutt. 'Let's 'ope it does.'

Putting the propeller shaft back into position, and settling it into its
bracket, and putting on the propeller again, called for a fresh spell of
subaqueous activity on the part of Allnutt.

'Coo blimey,' said Allnutt, emerging dripping at the side of the
_African Queen_. 'I oughter been a diver, not a blinkin' blacksmith.
Let's 'ave that other spanner, Rosie, an' I'll 'ave another go.'

Allnutt was very dear to her now, and she thought his remarks
extraordinarily witty.

When shaft and propeller were in position, there was very little chance
of testing the work. Once they left the bank they would have to go on
down the next cataract, willynilly. Allnutt got up steam in the boiler,
and sent the propeller ahead for a few revolutions, until the mooring
ropes strained taut, and then he went astern for a few revolutions more.
It was a good enough proof that shaft and propeller would turn, but it
proved nothing else. It did not prove that the propeller would stand up
to a full strain, nor that the shaft would not buckle under the impulse
of a head of steam. They would have to find that out amid the rapids and
cataracts, with death as their portion if Allnutt's work should fail
them.

The night before they had both of them visualized this situation, and
they had neither of them ventured to discuss it. They had lain in each
other's arms. Rose's eyes had been wet, and Allnutt's embrace had been
urgent and possessive, each of them consumed with fear of losing the
other. And this morning they tacitly acknowledged their danger, still
without mentioning it. Steam was up, a full cargo of wood was on board,
they were all ready for departure. Allnutt looked about him for the last
time, at their rock-built hearth, and his rock-built anvil, and the heap
of ashes that marked the site of one of their charcoal-burning
experiments. He turned to Rose, who was standing stiff and dry-eyed
beside the tiller. She could not speak; she could only nod to him.
Without a word he cast off the moorings, and held the _African Queen_
steady in the eddy with the boat-hook, while Rose scanned the surface of
the river.

'Right!' said Rose, and her voice cracked as she said it. The sound of
it hardly reached Allnutt's ears above the noise of the river and the
hiss of steam. Allnutt pushed with the boat-hook, and as the bows came
out into the current he gingerly opened the throttle.

'Good-bye, darling,' said Allnutt, bent over the engine.

'Good-bye, darling,' said Rose at the tiller.

Neither of them heard the other, and neither was meant to: there was a
high courage in them both.

The _African Queen_ surged out into the stream. For a moment they both
of them felt as if something was wrong, because the shaft clanked no
longer--it was straighter than it had been before the accident. Shaft
and propeller held firm, all the same. The launch spun round as her bows
met the current and Rose put the tiller across. Next moment, they were
flying downstream once more, with Allnutt attentive to the engines and
Rose at the tiller, staring rigidly forward to pick her course through
the weltering foam of the cataract ahead.




CHAPTER NINE


Somewhere along their route that day they passed the spot where the
Ulanga River changes its name and becomes the Bora. The spot is marked
in no map, for the sufficient reason that no map of the country has ever
been made, except for the hazy sketches which Spengler drew the year
before. Until Spengler and his Swahili boatmen managed to make the
descent of the river by canoe no one had known, even if they had
suspected it, that the big rapid river which looped its way across the
upland plateau and vanished into the gorges at Shona was the same as the
stream which appeared in the tangled jungle of the Rift Valley a hundred
miles from Shona and promptly lost itself again in the vast delta which
it had built up for itself on the shore of the Lake.

The native population before the arrival of the Germans had never
troubled their heads about it. The delta of the Bora was a pestilential
fever swamp; the rapids of the Ulanga were as Rose and Allnutt found
them. No one in their senses would waste a minute's thought about one or
the other, and since there was no practicable connexion between the
upper river and the lower it was of no importance whatever that they
should happen to have different names.

When all was said and done, the difference in their names was justified
by the difference in appearance. The change from the steep slope of the
side of the Rift Valley to its flat bottom was most noticeable. The
speed of the river diminished abruptly, and the character of the banks
changed as well.

For the Ulanga, travelling at its usual breakneck speed, is charged with
all sorts of detritus, and rolls much of its bed with it. No sooner does
it reach the flat land than all this matter in suspension is dropped in
the form of mud and gravel; the river spreads out, chokes itself with
islands, finds new sluggish routes for itself. It is to be supposed that
when the Lake was first formed it lapped nearly up to the edge of the
Rift Valley in which it lay, but for untold centuries the Ulanga--the
Bora, as it must now be called--has deposited its masses of soil on the
edge of its waters until a huge delta, as much as thirty miles along
each of its three sides, has been formed, encroaching upon the Lake, a
dreary, marshy, amphibious country, half black mud and half water,
steaming in a tropical heat, overgrown with dense vegetation, the home
of very little animal life, and pestilent with insects.

Rose and Allnutt quite soon noted indications that the transition was at
hand. For some time the current was as fast as ever, and the stream
irregular, but the cliffs which walled it in diminished steadily in
height and in steepness, until at last they were in no more than a
shallow valley, with a vast creeper-entangled forest close at hand, and
when they emerged from the shade, the sun blazed down upon them with a
crushing violence they had not known in the sunless gorges of the upper
river. The heat was colossal. Despite their motion through the stifling
air they were instantly bathed in a sweat which refused to evaporate,
and streamed down their bodies and formed puddles wherever its channel
was impeded, and dripped into their eyes, and stung them and blinded
them.

Rose was sweeping it from her face as she steered the _African Queen_
down the last flurry of rapids--not the roaring cataracts she had once
known, but a wider, shallower channel down which the water poured with a
velocity deceptively great, and where tree-trunks and shallows took the
place of the foaming rocks of the upper river. There was still need for
quick thinking and careful steering, because shallows grew up in the
middle of the river, and the deep channels divided and redivided,
coursing ever faster over the bottom, and growing ever shallower until
at last the rocky ledge underneath was passed and the water slid over a
steep sharp edge into water comparatively deep and comparatively slow.

Then there would be a respite for a time until a fresh change of colour
in the water, and fresh danger signals ahead in the form of glittering
patches of ripples, told of a new series of shallows approaching, and
Rose had to plan a course for half a mile ahead, picking out some
continuous deep channel, like a route through a maze, as far as the
distant line of the steep edge. She knew enough about boats by now to
guess that were she to choose a channel which died away into mere
rushing shallows they would be hurried along until they bumped against
the bottom, propeller and shaft damaged again, and probably, seeing how
fast the river was running, the boat would be swung round, buried under
the water piling against it, rolled over and torn to pieces while she
and Charlie--she would not allow her mind to dwell on that, but bent her
attention, with knitted brows, to seeing that the channels she chose did
not come to that sort of end.

The weather changed with all the suddenness associated with the Rift
Valley. Huge black clouds came rushing up the sky, intensifying the
dampness of the heat until it could hardly be borne. Directly after came
the lightning and the thunder, and the rain came pouring down, blotting
out the landscape as effectively as a fog would do. At the first sight
of the approaching storm Rose had begun to edge the _African Queen_ in
towards the shore, and the rain was just beginning when Allnutt got his
boat-hook into the stump of a huge tree which, still half alive, grew
precariously on the edge of the water with half its roots exposed. The
river had eaten away the bank all round it so that it formed a little
island surrounded by dark rushing water, and, swinging by their painter
to this mooring, they sat uncomfortably through the storm.

The light was wan and menacing, the thunder rolled without ceasing to
the accompaniment of a constant flicker of lightning. Yet the roar of
the rain upon the boat and the river was as loud as the roar of the
thunder. It beat upon them pitilessly, stupefying them. There was not
even an awning now to offer them its flimsy shelter. All they could do
was to sit and endure it, as if they were under the very heaviest type
of lukewarm shower bath, hardly able to open their eyes.

The warm wind which came with the rain set the _African Queen_ jerking
at her painter despite the constant tug of the current, and before the
storm had passed the wind blew from two-thirds of the points of the
compass, veering jerkily until at last Allnutt, blinded and stupefied
though he was, had to get out the boat-hook and hold the boat out from
the shore lest the wind should blow her aground and imperil the shaft
and propeller. Then at last the storm passed as quickly as it had come,
the wind died away, and the afternoon sun came out to scorch them,
setting the whole surface of the river steaming, and they could get out
the pump and labour to empty the boat of the water which had filled it
to the level of the floor-boards.

With the cessation of the rain came the insects, clouds of them, hungry
for blood, filling the air with their whining. Not even Rose's and
Allnutt's experience of insects on the upper plateau had prepared them
for an attack by these insects of the lower valley. They were ten times,
twenty times, as bad as they had known them on the Ulanga; and moreover
their comparative freedom in deep gorges had rendered them less
accustomed and more susceptible still. Down here there was a type of fly
new to them, a small black kind, which bit like a red-hot needle and
left a drop of blood at every bite, and this type was as numerous as any
of the dozen species of fly and mosquito which sang around them, flying
into their eyes and their nostrils and their mouths, biting mercilessly
at every exposed bit of skin. It was torment to be alive.

The coming of the evening and the sudden descent of night did nothing
towards enfeebling their attacks. It seemed impossible to hope for sleep
in that inferno of sticky heat under the constant torture of those
winged fiends. The memory of yesterday's fairly cool, insect-free bed,
when they had lain side by side in happy intimacy, seemed like the vague
recollection of a dream. Tonight they shrank from contact with each
other, writhing on their uncomfortable bed as if on the rack. Sleep
seemed unattainable and yet they were both of them worn out with the
excitement of the day.

Some time in the night Allnutt rose and fumbled about in the darkness.

''Ere,' he said. 'Let's try this, old girl. It can't be no worse.'

He had found the old canvas awning, and he spread it over the two of
them, although it seemed as if they would die under any sort of
covering. They drew the canvas about their faces and ears, streaming
with sweat in the stifling heat. Yet the heat was more endurable than
the insects. They slept in the end, half-boiled, half-suffocated; and
they awoke in the morning with their heads swimming with pain, their
joints aching, their throats constricted so that they could hardly
swallow. And the insects still attacked them.

They had to wallow ashore through stinking mud to find wood although it
seemed agony to move; it took half a dozen journeys before the _African
Queen_ was fully charged with fuel again, sufficient to get them through
the day. Already the sun was so hot that the floor-boards seemed to burn
their feet, and it was only Allnutt's calloused hands which could bear
the touch of metal work. How he could bear the heat of the fire and the
boiler was inconceivable to Rose; the heat which was wafted back to her
in the stern was sufficient for her.

Yet being under way at least brought relief from insects. The speed of
the _African Queen_ was sufficient to leave that plague behind, and out
in the middle of the river, half a mile broad here, there were no new
ones to be found. It was worth enduring the sledge-hammer heat of the
sun for that.

The character of the river and the landscape was changing rapidly.
Over-side the water, which had regained its familiar brown tint of the
upper reaches, was growing darker and darker until it was almost black.
The current was noticeably less, and quite early in the day they ran the
last of the rapids of the type they had encountered so frequently
yesterday. That indicated the last rocky ledge extending across the bed
of the river; they were definitely down the slope and in the bottom of
the Rift Valley now. There were no snags now; the river was far too
deep. With its half-mile of width and sixty feet of depth the current
slackened until it was almost unnoticeable, although a river engineer
could have calculated that the volume of water passing a given point in
a given time was equal to that higher up where the constricted shallow
channel had raced between its precipices.

On either bank now appeared broad fringes of reeds--papyrus and
ambash--and beyond them belts of cane indicated the marshy banks, and
beyond the cane could be seen the forest, dark and impenetrable. Out in
the centre of the river there was silence save for the clatter of the
engine and the breaking of the wash; the _African Queen_ clove her way
through the black water under the burning sun. In that vast extent of
water they seemed to be going at a snail's pace; there were loops and
bends in the river's course which they took a full two hours to get
round--motiveless bends, to all appearance, for there was no alteration
in the flat monotony of the banks.

Although there was no need now to keep watch against snags or rapids,
there was still need for some degree of vigilance on Rose's part. Much
of the surface of the river was cumbered with floating rubbish, tangles
of weed and cane, branches and logs of wood which might imperil the
propeller; the current was too slow here to force this flotsam out to
the banks and strand it there. It was a relief from the monotony of
steering to keep a look-out for the dangerous type of log floating
almost entirely submerged; and soon Rose began to lay a course which
took her close to each successive floating mass, and she and Allnutt
were able to select and pull in those bits of wood of a size suitable
for use in the fire. It comforted Rose's economical soul in some
inexpressible way to render the _African Queen_ by this means still more
independent of the shore, and in point of fact, as Rose observed to
herself, it was quite as well to maintain the supply of fuel as fully as
possible, having regard to the marshiness and inaccessibility of the
banks. The fuel they gathered in this way was sufficient to help
considerably towards maintaining their stock in hand, even though it did
not compensate for their whole consumption.

That day of monotonous sun and monotonous river wore slowly towards its
close. Allnutt came aft with a surprising suggestion.

'We needn't tie up to the bank tonight, old girl,' he said. 'It's a
muddy bottom, and we can use the anchor agine. I vote we anchor out
'ere. Mosquitoes won't find us 'ere. We don't want another night like
last night if we can 'elp it.'

'Anchor here?' said Rose. The possibility had not occurred to her. Five
yards had been the farthest from land they had ever lain at night, and
that was in the backwaters of the upper river--months ago, she felt. It
seemed queer to stop in that tiny boat a quarter of a mile from land,
and yet obviously there was no reason against it.

'All right,' she said, at length.

'I won't stoke no more then, and where we stops we--'

'Anchors' was the word Allnutt was going to use, but he did not have
time to say it, some minor crisis in the engine summoning him forward on
the jump. He turned and grinned reassurance to Rose after he had put
matters right.

Gradually the beat of the engine grew slower and slower, and the
_African Queen_'s progress through the water died away until it was
almost imperceptible. Allnutt went forward and let go the anchor, which
took out its chain with a mighty rattle that echoed across the river and
brought flights of birds out from the forest.

'Not sure that it's touching bottom,' said Allnutt philosophically. 'But
it doesn't matter. If we start driftin' near trouble, that ole anchor'll
stop us before the trouble gets too near. There ain't nothing that can
'urt us in sixty foot o' water. Now for Christ's sake let's rig up
somethink to give us a bit o' shade. I seen enough o' that sun to last
me a lifetime.'

The sun was still blazing malignantly down on them although the day was
so far advanced, but Allnutt stretched the remains of the awning
overhead and a rug along the awning stanchions, and there was a blessed
patch of shade in the sternsheets in which they could recline with their
eyes shielded from the persistent glare. As Allnutt had predicted, they
were nearly free from the mosquito curse here; the few insects that came
to bite were almost unnoticeable to people who had endured the assault
of millions yesterday.

Rose and Allnutt could even endure contact with each other again now;
they could kiss and be friendly. Rose could draw Allnutt's head down to
her breast, and clasp him to her in a new access of emotion. Later on
when peace had descended upon them they could talk together, in quiet
voices to suit the immense silence of the river.

'Well,' said Allnutt. 'We done it, old girl. We got down the Ulanga all
right. I didn't think it could be done. It was you who said we could. If
it 'adn't been for you, sweet'eart, we shouldn't be 'ere now. Don't yer
feel prard o' yerself, dear?'

'No,' said Rose, indignantly. 'Of course not. It was you who did it.
Look at the way you've made the engine go. Look how you mended the
propeller. It wasn't me at all.'

Rose really meant what she said. She was actually beginning to forget
the time when she had had to coerce him by silence into continuing the
voyage. In some ways this was excusable, for so much had happened since
then; if Rose had not known that it was only four weeks since the voyage
had started she would have guessed it to be at least three months. But
her forgetfulness was due to another cause as well; she was forgetting
because she wanted to forget. Now that she had a man of her own again it
seemed unnatural to her that she should have forgotten her femininity so
far as to have made plans, and coerced Allnutt, and so on. It was
Charlie who ought to have the credit.

'I don't think,' she said, very definitely indeed, 'there's another man
alive who could have done it.'

'Don't think anyone's likely to try,' said Allnutt, which was a very
witty remark and made Rose smile.

'We'll have a good supper tonight,' said Rose, jumping up. 'No, don't
you move, dear. You just sit still and smoke your old cigarette.'

They had their good supper, all of the special delicacies which the
Belgian manager of the mine received in his fortnightly
consignment--tinned tomato soup, and tinned lobster and a tin of
asparagus, and a tin of apricots with condensed milk, and a tin of
biscuits. They experimented with a tin of _pt de foie gras_, but they
neither of them liked it, and by mutual consent they put it over-side
half finished. And, swilling tea afterwards, they were both of them
firmly convinced that they had dined well. They were of the generation
and class which had been educated to think that all good food came out
of tins, and their years in Africa had not undeceived them.

The night came down and the river stretched on either side immeasurable
and vast in the starlight. The water was like black glass, unruffled by
any wind, and deep within it the reflection of the stars glowed like
real things. They fell into a dream-like state of mind in which it was
easy to believe that they were suspended high above the earth, with
stars above and stars below; the gentle motion of the boat as they moved
helped in the illusion.

'Coo!' said Allnutt, his head on Rose's shoulder. 'Ain't it lovely?'
Rose agreed.

Yet for all this hypnotic peace, for all the love they bore each other,
in the hearts of both was the determination of war. Rose's high resolve
to clear the Lake of England's enemies burned as high as ever,
unexpressed though it might be. Von Hanneken would not continue long to
flaunt the iron-cross flag unchallenged on Lake Wittelsbach if she could
prevent it. Every little while she thought, of those gas cylinders and
boxes of explosive up in the bow with a quiet confidence, in the same
way as she might in other circumstances think of a store-cupboard shelf
full of soap laid up ready for spring-cleaning. There was no flaunting
ambition about it, no desire to rival the fame of Florence Nightingale
or Grace Darling or Joan of Arc. It was a duty to be done, comparable
with washing dishes. Rose asked nothing more of life than something to
do.

For details, Charlie would have to attend to those--fuses and explosives
were more in a man's line. Charlie would see to it all right. It was a
perfectly natural gesture that at the thought of Charlie making an
efficient torpedo she should clasp his arm more tightly to her, evoking
in response a grunt of peaceful satisfaction.

That uxorious individual had no will of his own left now. What little
there was had evaporated by the second day of shooting the rapids, the
day when Rose had miraculously admitted him to her arms. He was content
to have someone to admire and to follow. Even though Rose had no thought
of rivalling Joan of Arc she resembled her in this power she exerted
over her staff. The last few days had been one long miracle in Allnutt's
eyes. Her complete fearlessness in the wild rapids which had turned his
bowels to water affected him indescribably.

There was constantly present in his mind's eye the remembered picture, a
composite formed during hundreds of anxious glances over his shoulder,
of Rose erect at the tiller, vigilant and unafraid amidst the frantic
turmoil of the cataracts--it was the lack of fear, not the vigilance,
which impressed him so profoundly. She had not been cast down when the
propeller broke. Her confidence had been unimpaired. She had been quite
sure he could mend it, although he had been quite sure he could not, and
behold, she was right. Allnutt was by now quite sure that she would be
right again in the matter of torpedoing the _Knigin Luise_, and he was
ready to follow her into any mad adventure to achieve it.

The very intimacy to which she admitted him, her tenderness for him,
confirmed him in this state of mind. No other woman had been tender to
Charlie Allnutt, not his drunken mother, nor the drabs of the East End,
nor the enslaved prostitutes of Port Said, nor Carrie his mistress at
the mine, whom he had always suspected of betraying him with the filthy
native labourers. Rose was sweet and tender and maternal, and in all
this she was different from everyone else. He could abandon all thought
of himself and his troubles while he was with her. It did not matter if
he was a hopeless failure as long as she forbore to tell him so.

When she pressed his arm he held her more closely to reassure himself
once more, and her kiss brought him peace and comfort.




CHAPTER TEN


To the tranquillity of the night succeeded the fever of the day. No
sooner had the sun climbed up out of the forest than it began to pour
its heat with insane violence upon the little boat exposed upon the
broad face of the river. It demanded attention in a manner that would
take no denial. The discomfort of immobility in the sun was such that
the instinctive reaction was to make instant preparations to move
somewhere else, even though bitter experience taught that there was no
relief in movement--even the reverse in fact, in consequence of the need
for firing up the boiler.

They headed on down the wide black river. Everything was still; the
surface was glassy as they approached it. Behind them the ripples of
their course and their spreading wake left behind a wedge-shaped area of
disturbed water, expanding farther and farther until a long way astern,
almost as far as the eye could see, it reached the reedy banks. They
went on through the breathless heat, winding eternally round the vast
motiveless bends of the river. There was just enough mist prevailing to
make the distance unreal and indistinct.

Rose brought the _African Queen_ slowly round one more bend. The mist
was thicker here. She could not determine the future course of the
river, whether at the bend of this reach it turned to the left or to the
right. It did not matter here, where the river was so wide and so deep.
Tranquilly she held on down the middle of the channel, a quarter of a
mile from either shore. She could be sure of seeing the direction of the
next bend when it came nearer.

Only slowly did it dawn upon her that the river had widened. In that
misty heat the banks looked much the same at half a mile as at a quarter
of a mile. Undoubtedly they were farther from both banks now. It did not
matter. She kept the _African Queen_ to her old course, heading for the
mist-enshrouded forest right ahead. She was sure that sooner or later
they would open up the next reach.

Somehow even half an hour's steaming did not reveal the channel. They
were nearing the dark green of the forest and the brighter green strip
of the reeds now. Rose could see a vast length of it with some
precision, but there was no break. She came to the conclusion that the
river must have doubled nearly back upon itself, and she put the tiller
over to starboard to approach the left-hand bank again. There was no
satisfaction to be found here. There was only the unbroken bank of reeds
and the eternal forest, and moreover, something in the contour of that
skyline seemed to tell her that it was not in this direction that the
river found an exit.

For a moment she dallied with the idea that perhaps the river ended
altogether somewhere in this neighbourhood, but she immediately put the
notion aside as ridiculous. Rivers only end thus abruptly in deserts,
not in rain-beaten forests of this sort. This was German Central Africa,
not the Sahara. She looked back whence they had come, but the last
stretch of comparatively narrow river was at least three miles back by
now, low down on the horizon and shrouded with mist and out of sight.

There was only one course to adopt which promised definite results. She
put the tiller over again and began to steer the _African Queen_
steadily along the edge of the fringe of weeds. Whatever happened to the
river, she was bound to find out if she kept along its bank for long
enough.

'D'you think this is the delta, dearie?' called Allnutt from the bows.
He was standing on the gunwale looking over the wide expanse of water.

'I don't know,' said Rose, and added, doggedly: 'I'll tell you soon.'

Her notion of a delta was a lot of channels and islands, not a lake five
miles wide with no apparent outlet.

They steamed along the fringe of reeds. A change in the character of the
water became noticeable to Rose's eye, practised through many long days
in watching the surface. It was black water here, and although it had
been black enough a little higher up, there was something different
about it. It was lifeless, lack-lustre water here. There were long
curling streaks upon it indicative of some infinitely slow eddy circling
in its depths. There was far more trash and rubbish afloat on the
surface than usual. In fact there seemed every indication that here they
had reached, in defiance of all laws of nature, an ultimate dead end to
the river.

'Beats me to guess where we've come to,' said Allnutt. 'Anywye, there's
a hell of a lot of wood 'ere. Let's stop and fill up while we can.'

It was not at all difficult to collect a full charge of fuel of all the
sorts Allnutt liked, from the long dead stuff which would give a quick
blaze to solid boughs which could be relied upon to burn for a
considerable time. Allnutt fished the wood out of the water. Even here,
a mile from solid land, there was insect life to be found. He shook all
sorts of semi-aquatic little creatures off it as he lifted it in. With
his axe he cut it into handy lengths, as well as he could in the boat,
and spread it out to dry over the floor-boards. Only an hour or two in
that blazing sun was necessary to bring even waterlogged wood into such
a condition that it would burn.

'I should fink we got enough now, Rosie,' said Allnutt at last.

They continued their journey along the reeds. Rose was conscious that
she was steadily bringing the tiller over to port. They must be making a
wide curve round the edge of this lake; a glance at the sun told her
that they were heading in a direction nearly opposite to the one in
which they had entered. On their left hand the bank of reeds grew wider
and wider, so wide in fact that it was hard to see any details of the
forest beyond it. Yet as a half-mile river must make an exit somewhere
along here, Rose remained confident, despite her wavering doubts, that
sooner or later they would come to a break. Strangely, there was no
break to be seen as the afternoon wore on. Here and there were vague
indications of tiny channels through the reeds, but they were very
indefinite indeed. Certainly they were not passages clear of reeds; it
was only that the reeds were sparser, as though there were a deeper bit
of water up to the shore in which only the tallest reeds could hope to
reach the surface. The forest was too distant and dense for any
indication to show there.

The only break in the monotony came when they scared a herd of
hippopotami, twenty or so of the beasts, in a wild panic through water,
reeds, and mud, until they all with one accord took cover beneath the
surface and vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared. Rose had
hardly a thought or a look for the hippopotami. She was thinking too
hard about this extraordinary behaviour of the river. She was still
using port helm to keep them at a constant distance from the bank. As
far as she could judge by the sun they were now nearly on the same
course as they had been when she had first noticed the widening of the
river. They must in consequence have come round almost in a full circle.

To confirm this opinion she looked over to starboard at the opposite
bank which had been barely in sight a quarter of an hour ago. It was
nearer now, far nearer. At the end of another ten minutes the horrid
suspicion was confirmed. They were back again at the mouth of the river,
at the point of its emergence into the Lake. She only had to starboard
the helm to head the _African Queen_ upstream, towards the rapids whence
they had come. It was a shock to her. A week or two ago she might have
wept with humiliation and disappointment, but she was of sterner stuff
now; and after her recent experiences there was hardly anything an
African river could do which would surprise her.

As a matter of fact, her mistake was perfectly excusable, as the
behaviour of the Bora and one or two other rivers which flow into Lake
Wittelsbach is very unusual, and is the result of the prolific character
of the aquatic vegetation of tropical Africa. The channels of the delta
of the Bora are narrow, floored with rich silt, and with hardly any
current to scour them--ideal conditions in that climate for the growth
of water weed. As a result the channels are nearly choked with weeds and
reeds, the flow through them grows less and less, and the river finds
itself dammed back at its outlet.

As a result it banks up into a lagoon behind its delta. The slight
increase in pressure which follows does, in the end, force some of the
water out through creeks and channels winding a precarious way through
the delta, but the lagoon itself increases in size with the steady
inflow from the river until in the end it turns the flank of the delta
on one side or the other, and bursts its way through into the Lake by a
new mouth. Then the level of the lagoon drops sharply, the current
through this new channel diminishes in proportion, and the whole process
is resumed, so that in the progress of centuries the delta extends
itself steadily from side to side.

In 1914, when Rose and Allnutt came down the river, it was fifteen years
since the last time the Bora had made a new mouth for itself, the lagoon
was nearly at its maximum size, and the few channels which remained
unchoked were so overgrown and winding that there was really nothing
surprising at Rose's missing them. She was not the fool she felt herself
to be in that bitter moment.

She was soothed to some extent by the stupidity of Allnutt. He,
engrossed in the supervision of the engines, had paid only small
attention to their course. When Rose called to him to stop he was
surprised. Looking about him at the wide river he quite failed to
recognize it. He thought Rose had found the outlet to the lake which
they had entered at a different point. It was only when Rose made him
drop the anchor and showed him that the slight, hardly perceptible
current was running in the opposite direction to the one he wished to
take that he admitted his mistake.

'These blinking banks look all one to me,' he said.

'They do to me, too,' said Rose, bitterly, but Allnutt remained
cheerfully optimistic.

'Anywye,' he said. ''Ere we are. We got a good mooring agine for
tonight, old girl. No mosquitoes. We might just as well be comfy and
forget abart things for a bit.'

'All right,' said Rose.

Yet she went on standing on the gunwale, one hand on the awning
stanchion and the other shading her eyes, staring across the lagoon at
the distant opposite shore, veiled in its greyish-purple mist.

'That's where the way out must be,' she decided. 'A lot of little
channels. I noticed quite a lot through the reeds and wouldn't take
them. Where we saw those hippos. We'll pick the best one tomorrow, and
get through somehow. It can't be very far to the Lake.'

If English explorers had turned back at the sight of apparent
impossibilities the British Empire would not be nearly its present size.

The night was not of the tranquillity which had characterized the
preceding one. Rose was discontented with the day's progress, and filled
with a vague disquiet about her capacity as a pilot. She was not used to
failure, and was annoyed with herself. Even at the end of two hours'
peace in the shade of the awning and screen which Allnutt rigged, she
had not regained her optimism. Instead she was merely filled with a
bitter determination to fight her way through that delta cost what it
might, or to die in the attempt--a resolution which hardened the set of
her mouth and made her conversation with Allnutt a little abstracted,
and made sleep slow in coming.

And just as distracting was the sound of the frogs in the reeds.
Hereabouts there must have been a colony of thousands, millions, of the
little brutes, to whom presumably the attraction of the place lay in the
suitability of the still water for spawning. They croaked in unison;
Rose could distinguish two distinct kinds of croak, a deep-voiced kind
whose volume never altered, and a higher-pitched kind which waxed and
waned with monotonous regularity. Despite the distance of the boat from
the reeds the din of that croaking came over the water to them as loud
as the noise of a heavy surf on a reef, and with much the same
variations of loudness and pitch. It was an infuriating noise, and it
went on all night.

It did not disturb Allnutt, for no accountable noise could do that, and
Allnutt's peaceful sleeping was nearly as annoying as the croaking of
the frogs to Rose in her wakefulness. She lay and sweated in the
breathless night, disturbed, uncomfortable, irritated. If Rose had ever
indulged in scolding or shrewishness she would have been an evil
companion the next morning, but a rigid upbringing had had sufficient
effect on her to prevent her from indulging in such a wanton abuse of
power. She did not yet know she could scold; she had never tasted the
sweet delights of giving rein to ill temper.

Instead, she was only curt and impatient, and Allnutt, after a sidelong
glance at her in response to some brief reply of hers to his
loquaciousness, had the sense to hold his tongue. He wagged his head to
himself and felt immensely wise, as he pondered over the inscrutable
ways of womanhood, and he saw to it that steam was raised and the boat
made ready for departure with the smallest possible delay.

Rose steered the _African Queen_ straight out across the lagoon towards
the place where she had decided she would find the best way through the
delta. The low band of trees across the horizon grew more and more
distinct. Soon they could distinguish the rich lush green of the reeds.

'Go slower now! called Rose to Allnutt, and the beat of the engine
slackened as Allnutt closed the throttle.

She took a course as close along the margin of the reeds as she dared.
She did not like the appearance of them at all, pretty though they were.
They grew in tough-looking, solid clumps, each stalk expanding at the
top into a rather charming flower-head, and, apart from a few bold
outliers, the clumps grew close together, while farther in towards the
shore they were crowded in a manner which would make progress through
them practically impossible. She did not know that probably this very
species had provided the 'bulrushes' which composed the ark in which
Moses had been set afloat on the Nile, nor that the learning of the
world was most deeply indebted to it for the paper it had provided all
through antiquity; and if she had known she would not have cared. All
she sought was a way through.

Twice she hesitated as they neared points where the reeds did not grow
quite so thickly, but each time she held on past them; there was the
channel beyond through the forest of the delta to be considered as well.
Such trivial indications of a waterway meant that its continuation
through the delta might be impassable. Then they reached a broader,
better defined passage. Rose raked back through her memory and decided
this was at least as good as any she had noticed yesterday. She put the
tiller over and turned the nose of the boat into the opening.

Nervously, Allnutt closed the throttle until the propeller was hardly
revolving, and the _African Queen_ glided among the reeds at a snail's
pace; Rose nodded approval, for they did not want to run any risks with
that patched propeller. The channel remained fairly clear of reeds as it
wound this way and that. Sometimes a clump scraped along the side with a
prodigious rustling; Allnutt was sounding over-side with the boat-hook.
It seemed that providentially the reeds refused to grow in water a
little deeper than the _African Queen_'s draught; a channel which was
clear of them was just navigable for her.

There came the inevitable moment when the channel bifurcated and a
choice had to be made. Rose stared out over the sea of reeds at the
nearing trees and brought the boat round into the most promising
channel. They glided on; at each side the growth of reeds became denser
and denser. And then the _African Queen_ seemed to hesitate in her
progress; there was something different about the feel of her, and
Allnutt reached hastily to the throttle and shut off steam.

'We're aground, dearie,' he said.

'I know that,' snapped Rose. 'But we've got to go on.'

Allnutt poked at the bottom with the boat-hook; it was deep semi-liquid
mud. There was no hope in consequence of their getting out and towing
her, which was the first idea which occurred to him. He displayed the
dripping boat-hook to Rose. 'We must pull her along by the reeds,' she
said, harshly. 'The keel will go through mud like that even though we
can't use the propeller.'

They addressed themselves to the task, Rose reaching out with her hands
to the clumps she could reach, and Allnutt with the boat-hook. Soon
their technique improved with experiment and experience. The papyrus
reed grows from a long solid root which extends a considerable distance
horizontally in the mud before turning upwards to form the head. Perched
up in the bows, Allnutt reached forward with the boat-hook, fumbled
about until he found a good grip, and then tugged the boat forward for a
couple of feet through the ooze. Then he had to abandon the root he had
found and search for a new one to gain another couple of feet.

It was terribly hot work among the reeds, which were not high enough to
give shade although they cut off what little wind there was, and the sun
glared down upon them with its noonday intensity. And soon the insects
found them; they came in clouds until the air was thick with them, mad
with the thirst for blood. The work was heavy and tiring, too. Two hours
of it left Allnutt gasping for breath, and whenever he gasped he
spluttered, in consequence of the insects he had drawn into his mouth.

'Sorry, miss,' he said at last, apologetically. 'Can't keep on at this,
not any 'ow.'

The face he turned towards Rose was as wet with perspiration as if he
had been under a shower bath; so were his rags of clothes. Neither he
nor Rose noticed his use of 'miss'--it sounded perfectly natural from a
beast of burden such as he had become.

'All right,' said Rose. 'Give me the boat-hook.'

'The work's a bit 'eavy,' said Allnutt, with a note of protest in his
tone.

Rose took no notice, but climbed past him on to the little fore-deck,
the boat-hook in her hand. Allnutt made as if to argue further, but did
not. He was too exhausted even to argue. He could only sink down into
the bottom of the boat and lie there with the sweat drip-drip-dripping
about him. For Rose, he had, literally, worked until he dropped. Rose
certainly found the work heavy. Reaching forward to get a grip with the
boat-hook was a strain. To get the boat to move forward over the mud and
the reed-roots called for the exertion of every particle of strength she
possessed--convulsive effort, to be followed immediately by the need for
another, and another after that, interminably.

It did not take very long to exhaust her completely. In the end she put
down the boat-hook with a clatter and reeled down the boat into the
waist, her clothes hanging about her in wet wisps. The flies followed
her, in myriads.

'We'll go on again tomorrow,' she gasped to Allnutt, who opened his eyes
at her as he slowly came back to normality.

The reeds were higher about them now, for in their progress under this
new method of traction they had practically left the papyrus behind and
were come into the territory of another genus, and the sun was lower.
They were in the shade at last; the boat, which had seemed as hot as a
gridiron to the touch, became almost bearable, and the flies bit worse
than ever. In time Rose recovered sufficiently to try to find out how
close they were to the shore. She climbed on the gunwale, but the giant
reeds stretched up over her head, and she could see nothing but reeds
and sky. How far they had come, how far they were from the forest, she
could not guess. She certainly had not anticipated taking a whole day to
get through a belt of reeds a mile wide, but here was the first day
ended and as far as she could tell they were only half-way in, and there
was nothing to indicate that they would ever get through at all. No
matter. They would go on trying tomorrow.

Anyone less stout-hearted than Rose might have begun to wonder what
would happen to them if their forward progress became impossible. There
was no chance at all of their pulling the boat back stern first the way
they had come. They would be held there until they starved like trapped
animals, or until they drowned themselves in the mud and slime beneath
the reeds, trying to make their way ashore on foot. Rose did not allow
that sort of notion to trouble her. Her resolution was such that no mere
possibility could alarm her. She was like Napoleon's ideal general, in
that she did not make pictures of what might be--just as, all through
this voyage, she had acted on Nelson's dictum, 'Lose not an hour'. If
following, however unconsciously, the advice of the greatest soldier and
the greatest sailor the world has ever seen would bring success to this
land-and-water campaign, success would be theirs. And if they failed it
would not be through lack of trying--that was what Rose was vowing to
herself as she fought the flies.




CHAPTER ELEVEN


There had been no need to moor the boat that night. No ordinary
manifestation of Nature could have stirred her far from where she lay
among those tall reeds. The wind that came with the thunder-storm that
night was hardly felt by them at all--it bowed the reeds right across
the boat, but sitting beneath the arch they formed they did not notice
the wind. They had to endure all the discomforts of the rain as it
poured down upon them in the dark, but even in those miserable
conditions the ruling passion of that quaint pair displayed itself
again.

'One thing abart this rine,' said Allnutt during a lull. 'It may deepen
the water in this 'ere channel--if you can call it a channel. This
afternoon we wasn't drorin' much more than there was 'ere. 'Alf a inch
would mike a 'ell of a big difference. It can't rine too much for me, it
can't.'

Then later that night, when the rain had long ceased, and Allnutt had
somehow got to sleep despite the mosquitoes, Rose was suddenly aware of
a noise. It was only the tiniest, smallest possible murmur, and only the
ear of faith could have heard it through the whining of the mosquitoes.
It was the noise of running water. From all around there came this
gentle sound, slighter than the quietest breathing--water seeping and
dribbling through the reeds as the level rose in the lagoon, helped on
by the gathered rain which the Bora was bringing down. Rose almost woke
up Allnutt, to listen to it, but refrained, and contented herself with
vowing to make an early start in the morning so as to take full
advantage of any rise before it could leak away through the
delta--although seeing that they always started at the first possible
moment it is hard to understand what Rose meant by an 'early start'.

There was this much variation, all the same, in their routine on rising
that morning, in that they did not have to spend time in firing up the
boiler and getting up steam. The sun was still below the tall reeds when
they were ready to start, and already before Allnutt had come up into
the bows to resume his yesterday's toil Rose was standing there, gazing
into the reeds, trying to make out what she could about their course.

There really was no denying that they were still in some sort of
waterway leading through the weeds. It was ill-defined; all there was to
be seen was a winding line along which the reeds grew less densely, but
it surely must lead somewhere.

'I fink she's afloat,' said Allnutt with satisfaction, taking the
boat-hook.

He reached out, found a hold, and pulled. There seemed to be a freer
movement than yesterday.

'No doubt about it,' reported Allnutt. 'We got all the water we want. If
it wasn't for these blasted reeds--'

The channel was narrower here than when they had entered it, and the
reeds caught against the sides as they moved along. Some had to be
crushed under the boat, with the result that as each pull progressed the
boat met with an increasing resistance; sometimes, maddeningly, she even
went back an inch or two as Allnutt sought for a fresh grip. The
resistance of the reeds, all the same, was far less unrelenting than the
resistance of yesterday's mud, and Rose was able to be of some help by
hastening about the boat freeing the sides from the reeds which impeded
them.

They crawled on, slowly but hopefully. From what they could see of the
sun there was no doubt that they were preserving a certain general
direction towards the delta. Suddenly there came a squeal of joy from
Allnutt.

'There's another channel 'ere!' he said, and Rose scrambled up into the
bows to see.

It was perfectly true. The channel they were in joined at an acute angle
a similar vague passage-way through the reeds, and the combined channel
was broader, better defined, freer from reeds. As they looked at its
dark water they could see that the fragments afloat on it were in
motion--as slow as a slow tortoise, but in motion nevertheless.

'Coo!' said Allnutt. 'Look at that current! Better look out, Rosie, old
girl. It'll be rapids next.'

They could still laugh.

Allnutt drew the _African Queen_ into the channel. It was delightful to
feel the boat floating free again, even though she could not swing more
than an inch to either side. He hooked a root and gave a hearty pull;
the boat made a good four feet through the water, and, what was more,
retained her way, creeping along steadily while Allnutt sought for a new
purchase.

'Blimy,' said Allnutt. 'We're going at a rate of knots now.'

A little later, as they came round a bend in the channel, Rose caught
sight of the trees of the delta. They were instantly obscured again by
the reeds, but the next bend brought them in sight again, not more than
two hundred yards off, and right ahead. She watched them coming nearer.
Almost without warning the passage through the weeds widened. Then,
abruptly, the reeds ceased, and the _African Queen_ drifted sluggishly
forward for a yard or two and then stopped. They were in a wide pool,
bordered on the farther side by dark trees, and the surface of the pool
was covered with water-lilies, pink and white, growing so closely that
it seemed as if the whole pool was a mass of vegetation.

The sunlight was dazzling after the green shade of the reeds; it took a
little while for their eyes to grow accustomed to the new conditions.

'That's the delta all right,' said Allnutt, sniffing.

A dank smell of rotting vegetation came to them across the water; the
farther bank was a wild tangle of trees of nightmare shape wreathed with
creepers.

'We won't 'alf 'ave a gime getting this old tub through that lot,' said
Allnutt.

'There's a channel over that way,' said Rose, pointing, 'Look!'

There certainly was some sort of opening into the forest there; they
could see white water-lilies blooming in the entrance.

'I 'spect you're right,' said Allnutt. 'All we got to do now, in a
manner of speaking, is to get there.'

He remembered the last water-lily pool they had encountered, high up on
the Ulanga. There all they had to do was to get out again, having once
entered. Here there was a hundred yards of weed-grown water to traverse.

'Let's try it,' said Rose.

'Course we're going to try it,' answered Allnutt, a little hurt.

It was not easy--nothing about that voyage to the Lake was easy. Those
water-lily plants seemed to yield at a touch of the boat-hook, and
afforded no purchase at all by which they could draw themselves along.
Yet at the same time they clung so thick about the boat as to limit its
progress as much as the reeds had done. Allnutt darkly suspected from
the behaviour of the boat that they were being caught upon the
screw--that precious screw with the weak blade--and rudder. The bottom
was of such liquidity that it offered practically no resistance to the
thrust of the boat-hook when used as a punt-pole, and in drawing the
pole out again Allnutt found that he pulled the boat back almost as much
as he had previously shoved it forward. Volleys of gas bubbles rose
whenever the boat-hook touched the bottom; the stink was atrocious.

'Can't we try rowing?' asked Rose. Time was passing with the rapidity
they always noticed when progress was slow, and they had hardly left the
edge of the pool.

'We might,' said Allnutt.

One item in the gear of the _African Queen_ was a canoe paddle. Allnutt
went forward and found it and gave it to Rose. He brought back a billet
of firewood for his own use.

Paddling the boat along made their progress a little quicker. There
could be nothing slapdash nor care-free about wielding a paddle in those
weeds. It had to be dipped carefully and vertically, reaching well
forward, and it had to be drawn back with equal care, without twisting,
lest at the moment of withdrawal it should be found so entangled as to
call for the use of a knife to free it.

It was not a rapid method of transport. Rose would note some cluster of
blooms up by the bows, and it would be at least a minute's toilsome work
before it was back alongside her. Nor was the _African Queen_ adapted
for paddling. She had to sit on the bench in the sternsheets twisted
uncomfortably sideways; a few minutes' paddling set up a piercing ache
under her shoulder-blade like the worst kind of indigestion. She and
Allnutt had continually to change sides for relief.

So slowly did they move that when they came completely to a standstill
they neither of them realized it at once, and went on paddling while the
suspicion grew until they looked round at each other through the
streaming sweat and found each had been thinking the same thing.

'We're caught up on something,' said Allnutt.

'Yes.'

'It's that ole prop. Can't wonder at it in this mess.'

They stood together at the side of the boat, but of course there was no
judging the state of affairs from there.

'Only one thing for it,' said Allnutt. He took out his knife, opened it,
and looked at its edge.

'A spot of diving is the next item on the programme, lidies and gents,'
he said. He tried to grin as he said it.

Rose wanted to expostulate; there was danger in that massed weed, but
Allnutt must chance the danger if the voyage was to go on.

'We'll have to be careful,' was all she could say.

'Yerss.'

Allnutt fetched a length of rope.

'We'll tie that round my waist,' he said, as he stripped off his
clothes. 'You count firty from the time I go under, an' if I ain't
coming up by then, you pull at that rope, an' pull, an' pull, an' go on
pulling.'

'All right,' said Rose.

Allnutt sat naked on the gunwale and swung his legs over.

'Good crocodile country this,' he said, and then, seeing the look on
Rose's face, he went on hastily: 'Nao it ain't. There ain't no croc on
earth could get through these weeds.'

Allnutt was not too sure about it himself. He was rising to an
unbelievable height of heroism in what he was doing. Not even Rose could
guess at the sick fear within him, but in reaction from his cowardice he
was growing foolhardy. He took his knife in his hand and dropped into
the water. Holding on to the gunwale, he breathed deeply half a dozen
times, and then ducked his head under the boat. His legs vanished under
the carpet of weed, while Rose began to count with trembling lips. At
'thirty' she began to pull on the rope, and she sighed with relief as
Allnutt emerged, all tangled with weed. He had to put up a
weed-clustered hand to pull a mask of the stuff from his face before he
could breathe or see.

'There's a lump like a beehive round that prop,' he said as he gasped
for breath. 'An' 'alf the weeds in the lake are anchored on to it.'

'Is it any use trying to clear it?'

'Ooh yerss. Stuff cuts easy enough. I'd done a good bit already when I
'ad to come up. Well, 'ere goes agine.'

At the fourth ascent Allnutt grinned with pleasure.

'All clear,' he said. ''Old the knife, will you, old girl? I'm comin'
in.'

He pulled himself up over the gunwale with Rose's assistance. The water
streamed off him and from the masses of weed which clung to his body.
Rose fussed over him, helping to pick him clean. Suddenly she gave a
little cry, which was instantly echoed by Allnutt.

'Just look at the little beggars!' said Allnutt--the swear words he
still refrained from using were those which, never having come Rose's
way, she did not know to be swear words.

On Allnutt's body and arms and legs were leeches, a score or more of
them, clinging to his skin. They were swelling with his blood as Rose
looked at them. They were disgusting things. Allnutt was moved at the
sight of them to more panic than he had felt about crocodiles.

'Can't you pull 'em off?' he said, his voice cracking. 'Arhh! The
beasts.'

Rose remembered that if a leech is pulled off before he is gorged he is
liable to leave his jaws in the wound, and blood-poisoning may ensue.

'Salt gets them off,' she said, and sprang to fetch the tin in which the
salt was kept.

Damp salt dabbed on the leeches' bodies worked like magic. Each one
contorted himself for a moment, elongated himself and thickened himself,
and then fell messily to the floor-boards. Allnutt stamped on the first
one in his panic, and blood--his own blood--and other liquid spurted
from under his foot. Rose scooped the remains and the other leeches up
with the paddle and flung them into the water. Blood still ran freely
from the triangular bites, drying in brown smears on Allnutt's body
under the blazing sun; it was some time before they could induce it to
clot at the wounds, and even when it was all over Allnutt was still
shuddering with distaste. He hated leeches worse than anything else on
earth.

'Let's get awye from 'ere,' was all the reply he could make to Rose's
anxious questionings.

They paddled on across the lily-pool. With the coming of the afternoon
some of the pink blooms began to close. Other buds opened,
ivory-coloured buds with the faintest tinge of blue at the petal tips.
That carpet of lilies was a lovely sight, but neither of them had any
eyes for its beauty. They sank into a condition of dull stupidity, their
minds deadened by the sun; they said nothing to each other even when
they exchanged places. Their course across the pool was as slow as a
slug's in a garden. They dipped and pulled on their paddles like
mechanical contrivances, save when their rhythm was broken by the clutch
of the maddening weeds upon the paddles.

The sun was lower by now; there was a band of shade on the rim of the
pool which they were approaching. With infinite slowness the _African
Queen_'s nose gained the shade. Allnutt nerved himself for a few more
strokes, and then, as the shade slid up to the stern and reached them,
he let fall his billet of wood.

'I can't do no more,' he said, and he laid his head down upon the bench.

He was nearly weeping with exhaustion, and he turned his face away from
Rose so that she would not see. Yet later on, when he had eaten and
drunk, his Cockney resilience of spirits showed itself despite the
misery the mosquitoes were causing.

'What we want 'ere,' he said, 'is a good big cataract. You know, like
the first one below Shona. We'd 'ave got 'ere from the other side of the
reeds in about a minute an' a 'alf, I should say, 'stead of a couple of
dyes an' not there yet.'

Later in the evening he was facetious again.

'We've come along under steam, an' we've paddled, an' we've pushed, an'
we've pulled the ole boat along wiv the 'ook. What we 'aven't done yet
is get out an' carry 'er along. I s'pose that'll come next.'

Rose remembered those words, later in the following day, and thought
they had tempted Providence.




CHAPTER TWELVE


In the morning there was only a narrow strip of water-lily lake to cross
under the urgings of the early sun. They fought their way across it with
renewed hope, for they could see the very definite spot where the lilies
ceased to grow, and the beginning of a channel through the delta, and
they felt that no obstacle to navigation could be as infuriating and
exhausting as those lilies.

The delta of the Bora is a mangrove swamp, for the water of Lake
Wittelsbach, although drinkable, is very slightly brackish, sufficiently
so for some species of mangrove to grow, and where mangroves can grow
there is no chance of survival for other trees. Where the mangroves
began, too, the water-lilies ended, abruptly, for they could not endure
life in the deep shade which the mangroves cast.

They reached the mouth of the channel and peered down it. It was like a
deep tunnel; only very rare shafts of light from the blazing sky above
penetrated its gloomy depths. The stench as of decaying marigolds filled
their nostrils. The walls and roof of the tunnel were composed of
mangrove roots and branches, tangled into a fantastic conglomeration of
shapes as wild as any nightmare could conceive.

Nevertheless, the repellent ugliness of the place meant no more to them
than had the beauty of the water-lilies. These days of travel had
obsessed them with the desire to go on. They were so set upon bringing
their voyage to its consummation that no place could be beautiful that
presented navigational difficulties, and they were ready to find no
place ugly if the water route through it were easy. When they crawled
out from the last clinging embrace of the water-lilies they both with
one accord ceased paddling to look into the water, each to his separate
side.

'Coo,' said Allnutt, in tones of deep disgust. 'It's grass now.'

The weed which grew here from the bottom of the water was like some rank
meadow grass. The water was nearly solid with it. The only encouraging
feature it displayed was that the long strands which lay along the
surface all pointed in the direction in which they were headed--a sure
sign that there was some faint current down the channel, and where the
current went was where they wanted to go too.

'No going under steam 'ere,' said Allnutt. 'Never get the prop to go
round in that muck.'

Rose looked down the bank of mangroves, along the edge of the lily pool.
They might try to seek some other way through the delta, but it seemed
likely that any other channel would be as much choked with weed, while
any attempts to find another channel would involve more slow paddling
through water-lilies. She formed her decision with little enough delay.

'Come on,' was all she said. She had never heard Lord Fisher's advice,
'Never explain,' but she acted upon it by instinct.

They leant forward to their work again and the _African Queen_ entered
into the mangrove swamp with the slowness to be expected of a steam
launch moved by one canoe paddle and one bit of wood shaped rather like
a paddle.

It was a region in which water put up a good fight against the land
which was slowly invading it. Through the mangrove roots which closed
round them they could see black pools of water reaching far inwards; the
mud in which the trees grew was half water, as black and nearly as
liquid. The very air was dripping with moisture. Everything was wet and
yet among the trees it was as hot as in an oven. It made breathing
oppressive.

'Shall I try 'ooking 'er along, now, Rosie?' said Allnutt. He was
refusing to allow the horror of the place to oppress his spirits. 'We
get along a bit better that wye.'

'We could both of us use hooks here,' said Rose. 'Can you make a hook?'

'Easy,' said Allnutt. Rose was fortunate in having an assistant like
him.

He produced a four-foot boat-hook quickly enough, beating the metal hook
out of an angle iron from an awning stanchion, binding it tightly to the
shaft with wire.

With both of them using hooks their progress grew more rapid. They stood
side by side in the bows, and almost always there was a root or branch
of the mangroves within reach on one side or the other, or up above, so
that they could creep along the channel, zigzagging from either side.
Reckoning the mangrove swamp as ten miles across, and allowing fifty per
cent extra for bends in the channel, and calling their speed half a mile
an hour--it was something like that--thirty hours of this sort of effort
ought to have seen them through. It took much longer than that, all the
same.

First of all, there were the obstructions in the channel. They
encountered one almost as soon as they entered among the mangroves, and
after that they recurred every few hundred yards. The _African Queen_
came to a standstill with a bump and a jar which they came to know only
too well--some log was hidden in the black depths of the water,
stretching unseen across the channel. They had to sound along its
length. Sometimes when they were fortunate there was sufficient depth of
water over it at some point or other to float the boat across, but if
there was not they had to devise some other means of getting forward.
The funnel early came down; Allnutt dismantled that and the awning
stanchions quite soon in consequence of the need for creeping under
overhanging branches.

Generally if the channel were blocked they could find some passage round
the obstruction through the pools of water which constituted a sort of
side channel here and there, but to work the _African Queen_ through
them called for convulsive efforts, which usually involved Allnutt's
disembarking and floundering in the mud and warping the launch round the
corners. It was as the _African Queen_ was slithering and grating over
the mud and the tree-roots that Allnutt's ill-omened words about getting
out and carrying the boat recurred to Rose's mind.

If there were no way over or round they had to shift the obstruction in
the channel somehow, ascertaining its shape and weight and attachments
by probings with the boat-hooks, heaving it in the end, with efforts
which in that Turkish-bath atmosphere made them feel as if their hearts
would burst, the necessary few inches this way or that. They grew
ingenious at devising methods of rigging tackle to branches above, and
fixing ropes to the obstructions beneath, so as to sway the things out
of their way. And Allnutt, perforce, overcame his shuddering hatred of
leeches--on one occasion they squatted in mud and water for a couple of
hours while with knives they made two cuts in a submerged root which
barred the only possible bit of water through which they could float the
_African Queen_.

It was a nightmare time of filth and sludge and stench. Be as careful as
they would, the all-pervading mud spread by degrees over everything in
and upon the boat, upon themselves, everywhere, and with it came its
sickening stink. It was a place of twilight, where everything had to be
looked at twice to make sure what it was, so that, as every step might
disturb a snake whose bite would be death, their flounderings in the mud
were of necessity cautious.

Worse than anything else it was a place of malaria. The infection had
probably gained their blood anew in the lower reaches of the Bora before
they reached the delta, but it was in the delta that they were first
incapacitated. Every morning they were prostrated by it, almost
simultaneously. Their heads ached, and they felt a dull coldness
creeping over them, and their teeth began to chatter, until they were
helpless in the paroxysm, their faces drawn and lined and their
finger-nails blue with cold. They lay side by side in the bottom of the
boat, with the silent mangrove forest round them, clutching their filthy
rags despite the sweltering steamy heat which they could not feel. Then
at last the cold would pass and the fever would take its place, a
nightmare fever of delirium and thirst and racking pain, until when it
seemed they could bear no more the blessed sweat would appear, and the
fever die away, so that they slept for an hour or two, to wake in the
end capable once more of moving about--capable of continuing the task of
getting the _African Queen_ through the Bora delta.

Rose dosed herself and Allnutt regularly with quinine from the portable
medicine chest in her tin trunk; had it not been for that they would
probably have died and their bones would have mouldered in the rotting
hull of the _African Queen_ among the mangroves.

They never saw the sun while they were in that twilight nightmare land,
and the channel twisted and turned so that they lost all sense of
direction and had no idea at all to which point of the compass they were
heading. When the channel they were following joined another one, they
had to look to see which way the water was flowing to decide in which
direction to turn, and where it was so dark that even the water grass
would not grow, as happened here and there, they had to note the
direction of drift of bits of wood placed on the surface--an almost
imperceptible drift, not more than a few yards an hour.

It was worse on the two occasions when they lost the channel altogether
as a result of forced detours through pools round obstacles. That was
easy enough to do, where every tangle of aerial roots looked like every
other tangle, where the light was poor and there was nothing to help fix
one's direction, and where to step from the islands of ankle-deep slime
meant sinking waist-deep in mud in which the hidden roots tore the skin.
When they were lost like this they could only struggle on from pool to
pool, if necessary cutting a path for the boat with the axe by infinite
toil, until at last it was like Paradise to rejoin a murky,
root-encumbered channel on which they might progress as much as fifty
yards at a time without being held up by some obstacle or other.

They lost all count of time in that swamp. Days came and went, each with
its bout of chill and fever; it was day when there was light enough to
see, and night when the twilight had encroached so much that they could
do no more, and how many days they passed thus they never knew. They ate
little, and what they ate stank of the marshes before they got it to
their mouths. It was a worse life than any animal's, for no animal was
ever set the task of coaxing the _African Queen_ through those
mangroves--with never a moment's carelessness, lest that precious
propeller should be damaged.

No matter how slippery the foothold, nor how awkward the angle of the
tow-rope, nor how imminent an attack of malaria, the launch had always
to be eased round the corner inch by inch, without a jerk, in case
during her lateral progress the propeller should be swung sideways
against some hidden root. There was never the satisfaction of a vicious
tug at the rope or a whole-hearted shove with the pole.

They did not notice the first hopeful signs of their progress. The
channel they were in was like any other channel, and when it joined
another channel it was only what had happened a hundred times before;
they presumed that there would be a bifurcation farther on. But when yet
another large channel came in they began to fill with hope. The boughs
were thinning overhead so that it grew steadily lighter; the channel was
deep and wide, and although it was choked with water grass that was only
a mere trifle to them now after some of the obstacles they had been
through, and they had developed extraordinary dexterity at hooking the
_African Queen_ along by the branches. They did not dare to speak to
each other as the channel wound about, a full ten feet from side to
side.

And then the channel broadened so that real sunlight reached them, and
Allnutt could wait no longer before speaking about it, even if it should
be unlucky.

'Rosie,' he said. 'D'you fink we got through, Rosie?'

Rose hesitated before she spoke. It seemed far too good to be true. She
got a good hold on an aerial root and gave a brisk pull which helped the
_African Queen_ bravely on her way before she dared to reply.

'Yes,' she said at length. 'I think we have.'

They managed to smile at each other across the boat. They were horrible
to look at, although they had grown used to each other. They were filthy
with mud--Rose's long chestnut hair, and Allnutt's hair, and the beard
which had grown again since they had entered into the delta were all
matted into lumps with it. Their sojourn in the semi-darkness had
changed their deep sunburn into an unhealthy yellow colour which was
accentuated by their malaria. Their cheeks were hollow and their eyes
sunken, and through the holes in their filthy rags could be seen their
yellow skins, with the bones almost protruding through them. The boat
and all its contents were covered with mud, brought in by hurried
boardings after negotiating difficult turns. They looked more like
diseased savages of the Stone Age than such products of civilization as
a missionary's sister and a skilled mechanic. They still smiled at each
other, all the same.

Then the channel took another turn, and before them there lay a vista in
which mangroves played hardly any part.

'Reeds!' whispered Allnutt, as though he hardly dared to say it.
'Reeds!'

He had experienced reeds before, and much preferred them to mangroves.
Rose was on tiptoe on the bench by now, looking over the reeds as far as
she could.

'The Lake's just the other side,' she said.

Instantly Rose's mind began to deal with ways and means, as if she had
just heard that an unexpected guest was about to arrive to dinner.

'How much wood have we got?' she asked.

'Good deal,' said Allnutt, running a calculating eye over the piles in
the waist. ''Bout enough for half a dye.'

'We ought to have more than that,' said Rose, decisively.

Out on the Lake there would not be the ready means of replenishment
which they had found up to now. The _African Queen_ might soon be
contending with difficulties of refuelling beside which those of Muller
and von Spee would seem child's play. There was only one effort to be
asked of the _African Queen_, but she must be equipped as completely as
they could manage it for that effort.

'Let's stop here and get some,' she decided.

To Allnutt, most decidedly, and to herself in some degree, the decision
was painful. Both of them, now that they had seen a blue sky and a wide
horizon, were filled with a wild unreasoning panic. They were madly
anxious to get clear away from those hated mangroves without a second's
delay. The thought of an extra hour among them caused them distress;
certainly, if Allnutt had been by himself he would have dashed off and
left the question of fuel supply to solve itself. But as it was he bowed
to Rose's authority, and when he demurred it was for the general good,
not to suit his own predilections.

'Green wood's not much good under our boiler, you know,' he said.

'It's better than nothing,' replied Rose. 'And I expect it'll have a day
or two to dry off before we want it.'

They exchanged a glance when she said that. All the voyage so far had
been designed for one end, the torpedoing of the _Knigin Luise_. That
end, which had seemed so utterly fantastic to Allnutt once upon a time,
was at hand now; he had not thought about it very definitely for weeks,
but the time was close upon him when he would have to give it
consideration. Yet even now he could not think about it in an
independent fashion; he could only tell himself that quite soon he would
form some resolve upon the matter. For the present he had not a thought
in his head. He moored the _African Queen_ up against the mangroves and
took his axe and cut at the soft pulpy wood until there was a great heap
piled in the waist. And then at last they could leave the mangroves for
the happy sanctuary of the reeds.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


It was a very definite mouth of the Bora by which they had emerged.
There was a fairly wide channel through the reeds, and they had no
sooner entered it and turned one single corner than the limitless
prospect of the Lake opened before them--golden water as far as the eye
could see ahead, broken by only one or two tree-grown islands. On either
side of the channel were shoals, marked by continuous reeds, extending
far out into the Lake, but those they could ignore. There was clear
water, forty miles broad and eighty long, in front of them, not a rock,
nor a shoal, nor a water-lily, nor a reed, nor a mangrove to impede
them--unless they should go out of their way to seek for them. The
sensation of freedom and relief was absolutely delicious. They were like
animals escaped from a cage. Moored among the reeds, with the _African
Queen_ actually rocking a little to a minute swell coming in from the
Lake, they slept more peacefully, plagued though they were with frogs
and flies, than they had done for days.

And in the morning there was still no discussion of the torpedoing of
the _Knigin Luise_. To Rose with her methodical mind it was necessary
to complete one step before thinking about the next.

'Let's get the boat cleaned out,' she said. 'I can't bear all this.'

Indeed, in the glaring sunlight the filth and mess in the boat were
perfectly horrible. Rose literally could not think or plan surrounded by
such conditions. They jangled her nerves unbearably. No matter if the
_African Queen_ were shortly to be blown to pieces when she should
immolate herself against the _Knigin Luise_'s side, Rose could not bear
the thought of passing even two or three days unnecessarily in that
dirt.

The water over-side was clear and clean. By degrees they washed the
whole boat, although it involved moving everything from place to place
while they washed. Allnutt got the floor-boards up and cleaned out the
reeking bilge, while Rose knelt up in the sternsheets and gradually
worked clean the rugs and the clothing and the articles of domestic
utility. It was a splendid day, and in that sunshine even a thick rug
dried almost while you looked at it. Such a domestic interlude was the
best sort of holiday Rose could have had; perhaps it was not only
coincidence that they both of them missed their attacks of malaria that
morning.

Rose got herself clean, too, for the first time since their entry into
the mangroves, and felt once more the thrill of putting on a fresh clean
frock on a fresh clean body. That was literally the case, because Rose
had taken the step which she had tried to put aside in the old days of
the mission station--she was wearing no underclothes. Most of them had
been consumed in the service of the boat--as hand shields when the
propeller shaft was straightened and so on--and the rest was dedicated
to Allnutt's use. His own clothing had disintegrated, and now he moved
chastely about the boat in Rose's chemise and drawers; the modest
trimming round the neck and the infinite number of tucks about his
thighs were in comical contrast with his lean unfeminine form.

Perhaps it was as a result of these civilized preoccupations that Rose
that night thought of something which had slipped from her memory
utterly and completely from the moment she had left the mission station.
She herself, later, believed on occasions that it was God Himself who
came and roused her from her sleep, her breast throbbing and the blood
pulsing warm under her skins although when she was in a more modest mood
she attributed it to her 'better self' or her conscience.

She had not said her prayers since she joined the _African Queen_; she
had not even thought about God. She woke with a start as this
realization came upon her, and she lay with wave after wave of
remorse--and fear, too--sweeping over her. She could not understand how
it was that the God she worshipped had not sent the lightning, which had
so frequently torn the sky about her, to destroy her. She was in an
agony lest He should do so now before she could appease Him. She
scrambled up to her knees and clasped her hands and bowed her head and
prayed in a passion of remorse.

Allnutt, waking in the night, saw the profile of her bowed figure in the
starlight, and saw her lift her face to Heaven with her cheeks wet with
tears and her lips moving. He was awed by the sight. He did not pray
himself, and never had done so. The fact that Rose was able to pray in
tears and agony showed him the superiority of her clay over his. But it
was a superiority of which he had long been aware. He was content to
leave the appeal for Heavenly guidance to Rose just as he had left to
her the negotiation of the rapids of the Ulanga. It took a very great
deal to deprive Allnutt of his sleep. His eyes closed and he drifted off
again, leaving Rose to bear her agony alone.

In that awful moment Rose would have found no comfort in Allnutt anyway.
It was a matter only for her and God. There was no trace of the
iron-nerved woman, who had brought the _African Queen_ down the Ulanga,
in the weeping figure who besought God for forgiveness of her neglect.
She could make no attempt to compound with God, to offer future good
behaviour in exchange for forgiveness of the past, because her training
did not permit it. She could only plead utter abject penitence, and beg
for forgiveness as an arbitrary favour from the stern God about whom her
brother had taught her. She was torn with misery. She could not tell if
she were forgiven or not. She did not know how much of hellfire she
would have to endure on account of these days of forgetfulness.

Worse still, she could not tell whether or not her angry God might not
see fit to punish her additionally by blasting her present expedition
with failure. It would be an apt punishment, seeing that the expedition
was the cause of her neglect. There was a Biblical flavour about it
which tore her with apprehension. In redoubled agony she begged and
prayed to God to look with favour on this voyage of the _African Queen_,
to grant them an opportunity of finding the _Knigin Luise_ and of
sinking her, so that the hated iron-cross flag would disappear from the
waters of Lake Wittelsbach and the allies might pour across to the
conquest of German Central Africa. She was quite frantic with doubts and
fear; the joints of her fingers cracked with the violence with which she
clasped them.

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 to 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 _Knigin Luise_ as rabidly 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. Ther beasts! Ther 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 _Knigin 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 _Knigin 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
in 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 fore-deck 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
_Knigin 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 _Knigin 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 _Knigin
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.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


When 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 _Knigin 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 _Knigin 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 judgement. Her mission would
be too difficult to succeed if the Germans were on the look-out 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 _Knigin Luise_ had altered course a trifle, and was standing out
from the shore.

'She's not looking for us, then,' said Allnutt.

They watched her as she steamed 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 she had come 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 fought 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 in the _Knigin
Luise_ at approximately that time. Even though the crew of the _Knigin
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 already 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 today,' 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 todye. Saturday nights I expect they goes into Port
Livingstone an' lay 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 Kauffmann, 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 _Knigin Luise_ had once moored
amongst those islands she would do so again. Then--her plan was already
formed.

'Charlie,' she said, and her voice was gentle.

'Yerss, old girl?'

'You must start getting those torpedoes ready. Tomorrow morning, as soon
as it's light. How long will it take?'

'I can get the stuff into the tubes in no time, as you might say. Dunno
about the detonators. Got to mike 'em, you see. Might take a coupler
dyes easy. Matter of fact, I 'aven't thought about 'em prop'ly. Then we
got to cut those 'oles in the bows-- that won't tike long. Might 'ave it
all done in a coupler dyes. Everything. If we don't 'ave malaria too
bad. Depends on them detonators.'

'All right.' There was something unnatural about Rose's voice.

'Rosie, old girl,' said Allnutt. 'Rosie.'

'Yes, dear?'

'I know what you're thinkin' about doing. You needn't try to 'ide it
from me.'

Had it not been for the discordant Cockney accent Allnutt's voice in its
gentleness might have been that of some actor in a sentimental moment on
the stage. He took her hand in the darkness and pressed it, unresponsive
as it was.

'Not now, you needn't 'ide it, darling,' he said. Even at that moment
his Cockney self-consciousness came to embarrass him and he tried to
keep the emotion out of his voice. For them there was neither the
unrestraint of primitive people nor the acquired self-control of other
classes of society.

'You want to tike the _African Queen_ out at night next time the
_Louisa_'s 'ere, don't yer, old girl?' said Allnutt.

'Yes.'

'I fink it's the best chance we got of all,' said Allnutt. 'We oughter
manage it.'

Allnutt was silent for a second or two, making ready for his next
argument. Then he spoke.

'You needn't come, old girl. There ain't no need for us both to--to do
it. I can manage it meself, easy.'

'Of course not,' said Rose. 'That wouldn't be fair. It's you who ought
to stay behind. I can manage the launch on my own as far as those
islands. That's what I was meaning to do.'

'I know,' said Allnutt, surprisingly. 'But it's me that ought to do it.
Besides, with them beggars--'

It was an odd argument that developed. Allnutt was perfectly prepared by
now to throw away the life that had seemed so precious to him. This plan
of Rose's which had already materialized so far and so surprisingly had
become like a living thing to him--like a piece of machinery would
perhaps be a better analogy in Allnutt's case. There would be something
wrong about leaving it incomplete. And somehow the sight of the _Knigin
Luise_ cruising about the Lake 'as bold as brass' had irritated Allnutt.
He was aflame with partisanship. He was ready for any mad sacrifice
which would upset those beggars' apple-cart--presumably Allnutt's
contact with the German nation had been unfortunate; the Germans were a
race it was easy to hate if hatred came easily, as it did in those days.
There was a fierce recklessness about him, in odd contrast with his
earlier cowardice.

Perhaps no one can really understand the state of mind of a man who
volunteers in war for a duty that may lead to death, but that such
volunteers are always forthcoming has been proved by too many pitiful
events in history.

Allnutt tried to reason with Rose. Although they had both of them
tacitly dropped their earlier plan of sending the _African Queen_ out on
her last voyage with no crew on board--Rose knew too much about the
launch's little ways by now--Allnutt tried to argue that for him there
would be no serious risk. He could dive off the stern of the boat a
second before the crash, as soon as he was sure she would attain the
target. Even if he were at the tiller (as privately he meant to be, to
make certain), the explosion right up in the bows might not hurt
him--Allnutt had the nerve to suggest that, even when he had a very
sound knowledge of the power of explosives and could guess fairly
accurately what two hundredweight of high explosive would do if it went
off all at once. In fact, Allnutt was on the point of arguing that
blowing up the _Knigin Luise_ would be a perfectly safe proceeding for
anybody, until he saw what a loophole that would leave for Rose's
argument.

It all ended, as was inevitable, in their agreeing in the end that they
would both go. There was no denying that their best chance of success
lay in having one person to steer and one to tend the engine. It was
further agreed between them that when they were fifty yards from the
_Knigin Luise_ one of them would jump overboard with the life-buoy; but
Allnutt thought that it was settled that Rose should do the jumping, and
Rose thought that it would be Allnutt.

'Not more'n a week from now,' said Allnutt, meditatively.

They had a feeling of anticipation which if not exactly pleasurable was
not really unpleasant. They had been working like slaves for weeks now
at imminent risk of their lives to this one end, and they had grown so
obsessed with the idea that they could not willingly contemplate any
action which might imperil its consummation. And in Rose there burned
the flame of fanatical patriotism as well. She was so convinced of the
rightness of the action she contemplated, and of the necessity for it,
that other considerations--even Charlie's safety--weighed with her
hardly at all. She could reconcile herself to Charlie's peril as she
might have reconciled herself if he were seriously ill, as something
quite necessary and unavoidable. The conquest of German Central Africa
was vastly, immeasurably more important than their own welfare--so
immeasurably more important that it never occurred to her to weigh the
one against the other. She glowed, she actually felt a hot flush, when
she thought of the triumph of England.

She rose in the darkness, with Allnutt beside her, and looked over the
vague reeds across the Lake. There were stars overhead, and stars
faintly reflected in the water. The moon had not yet risen. But right
over there was a bundle of faint lights which were neither stars nor
their reflections. She clasped Allnutt's arm.

'That's them, all right,' said Allnutt.

Rose only realized then what a practical sailor would have thought of
long before, that if the Germans took the precaution of hiding all
lights when they were anchored the task of finding them on a dark night
might well be impossible. Yet as they were in the only ship on the Lake,
and forty miles from their nearest earth-bound enemy, there was
obviously no need for precaution.

The sight of those lights made their success absolutely certain, at the
moment when Rose first realized that it might not have been quite so
certain. She felt a warm gratitude towards the fate which had been so
kind. It was in wild exaltation that she clasped Allnutt's arm. In all
the uncertainty of future peril and all the certainty of future triumph
she clung to him in overwhelming passion. Her love for him and her
passion for her country were blended inextricably, strangely. She kissed
him in the starlight as Joan of Arc might have kissed a holy relic.




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


In the morning they saw the _Knigin Luise_ get under way and steam off
to the northward again on her interminable patrolling of the Lake.

'We'll be ready for her when she comes back,' said Rose, tensely.

'Yerss,' said Allnutt.

With Rose's help he extricated the two heavy gas cylinders from the
bottom of the boat and slid them back handily to the waist. They were
foul with rust, but so thick was the steel that they could have borne
months more of such exposure without weakening. Allnutt turned on the
taps, and all the air was filled with an explosive hissing, as the gas
poured out and the pressure-gauge needles moved slowly back to zero.
When the hissing had subsided Allnutt got to work with his tools and
extracted the whole nose-fitting from each cylinder. There was left a
round blank hole in each, opening into the empty dark within.

Very carefully they prised open the boxes of explosive. They were packed
with what looked like fat candles of pale yellow wax, each wrapped in
oiled paper. Allnutt began methodically and cautiously to pack the
cylinders with them, putting his arm far down into the interior.

'M'm,' said Allnutt. 'It'd be better if they weren't loose like this.'

He looked round the boat for packing material, and was momentarily at a
loss. His ingenuity had been sharpened by all the recent necessity to
employ makeshifts.

'Mud's the stuff,' he announced.

He went up into the bows, and, leaning over the side, he began to scoop
up handfuls of the black mud from the bottom, and slapped them down upon
the fore-deck to become nearly dry in the sun.

'I'll do that,' said Rose, as soon as she realized what he intended.

She squeezed the water from the stinking black mud, and then spread the
handfuls on the hot deck, and worked upon them until they were nearly
hard. Then she carried the sticky mass back to Allnutt and set herself
to preparing more.

Bit by bit Allnutt filled the cylinders, cementing each layer of
explosive hard and firm with mud. When each was full right up to the
neck he stood up to ease his aching back.

'That's done prop'ly,' he said with pride, looking down at the results
of his morning's work, and Rose nodded approval, contemplating the
deadly things lying on the floor-boards. They neither of them saw
anything in the least fantastic in the situation.

'We got to make them detonators now,' he said, 'I got an idea. Thought
of it last night.'

From the locker in which his toilet things were stored he brought out a
revolver, heavily greased to preserve it from the air. Rose stared at
the thing in amazement; it was the first she knew of the presence of
such a weapon in the boat.

'I 'ad to 'ave this,' explained Allnutt. 'I used to 'ave a 'ole lot o'
gold on board 'ere goin' up to Limbasi sometimes. A hundred ounces an'
more some weeks. I never 'ad to shoot nobody, though.'

'I'm glad you didn't,' said Rose. To shoot a thief in time of peace
seemed a much more unpleasant thing than to blow up a whole ship in time
of war.

Allnutt broke open the revolver and took the cartridges into his hand,
replacing the empty revolver in the locker.

'Now let me see,' he said, musingly.

Rose watched the idea gradually taking shape under his hands; the things
took time to construct--what with meals, and sleep, and malaria it was
all of the two days of Allnutt's previous rough estimate before they
were ready.

First, he had, very laboriously, to shape with his knife two round discs
of hard wood which would screw tightly into the noses of the cylinders.
Then in each disc he pierced three holes of such a size that he could
just force the cartridges into them. When the discs were in position in
the nozzles the bullets and the ends of the brass cartridge cases would
now rest in among the explosive.

The rest of the work was far more niggling and delicate and Allnutt
discarded several pieces before he was satisfied. He cut two more discs
of wood of the same size as the previous two, and he was meticulous
about what sort of wood he used. He wanted it neither hard nor rotten,
something through which a nail could be driven as easily as possible and
yet which would hold the nail firmly without allowing it to wobble. He
made several experiments in driving nails into the various kinds of wood
at his disposal before he eventually decided to use a piece of one of
the floor-boards.

Rose quite failed to guess at the motive of these experiments, but she
was content to sit and watch, and hand things to him, as he worked away
in the flaming sunlight with the masses of mosquitoes always about him.

When the new discs were cut Allnutt carefully laid them on the others
and noted exactly where the bases of the cartridges would rest against
them. At these points he made ready to drive nails through the new
discs, and, as a final meticulous precaution, he filed the points of the
nails to the maximum of sharpness. He drove the nails gingerly through
the discs at the points which he had marked, and on the other side he
pared away small circles of wood into which the bases of the cartridges
would fit exactly, so when that was done the points of the nails were
just showing as gleaming traces of metal exactly in the middle of each
shallow depression, while on the other side the heads of the nails
protruded for a full inch.

Finally, he screwed his pairs of discs together.

'That's all right now,' said Allnutt.

Each pair of discs was now one disc. On one side of the disc showed the
nail-heads, whose points rested against the percussion caps in the bases
of the cartridges, the bullets of which showed on the opposite side. It
was easy to see now that when the disc was in its place in the cylinder
nose, and the cylinder pointing out beyond the bows of the _African
Queen_, the boat would be herself a locomotive torpedo. When she was
driven at full speed against the side of a ship the nails would be
struck sharply against the cartridges. They would explode into the high
explosive packed tight in the cylinders.

'I don't think I could do it any better,' said Allnutt, half
apologetically. 'They ought to work all right.'

There were three cartridges to each cylinder; one at least ought to
explode; there were two cylinders, each containing nearly a
hundredweight of explosive--one cylinder, let alone two, ought to settle
a little ship like the _Knigin Luise_.

'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 got 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 out 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 out 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 goin' 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 explosion against the side of
the _Knigin 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 water-lily 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, marvellously, 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 _Knigin 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
_Knigin 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 had begun 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 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 _Knigin 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 _Knigin Luise_, about to make
their 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 they had reached it
without difficulty. They would share all the danger, and stand the same
chance, side by side, when the _African Queen_ drove her torpedoes
smashing against the side of the _Knigin 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. 'Good-bye, dear.'

'Good-bye, 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 _Knigin 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 reeds,
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 nail-heads they would be
blown into fragments, and the _Knigin 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 draughts. He knew just where abouts to lay his
hands on the various sorts of wood he might need before they reached the
_Knigin 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 _Knigin 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 least seaworthy 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.

It was all dark; Rose had no way of knowing if the stupefying water
which was deluging her was rain or spray or waves. In that chaos all she
could do was to keep her hand on the tiller and try to keep her footing.
There was no possible chance of seeing the lights of the _Knigin
Luise_.

Allnutt was at her side. He was putting her arm through the huge
lumbering life-buoy which had always seemed to bulk so unnecessarily
large in the boat's equipment. Then as they tottered and swayed in the
drenching dark he was taken from her. She tried to call to him
unavailingly. She felt a surge of solid water round her waist. A wave
smacked her in the face; she was strangling with the water in her
nostrils.

The _African Queen_ had sunk, and with her ended the gallant attempt to
torpedo the _Knigin Luise_ for England's sake. And as though the storm
had been raised just for Germany's benefit it died away with the sinking
of the _African Queen_, and the wayward water fell smooth again, just as
it had done once long ago on another inland sea, that of Galilee.




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


The President of the Court looked with curiosity at the prisoner. He
tried conscientiously not to see him as he was now, but as he might have
looked in civilized array. He tried to discount the mop of long tangled
hair, and the sprouting beard, and he told himself that it was an
ordinary face, one that might pass quite unnoticed on the Kurfurstendamm
any day of the week. The prisoner was a sick man. That was obvious
additionally to his weary and disheartened manner, and his feebleness
was due to illness as well as to fatigue. The President of the Court
told himself that if ever he had seen the characteristic features of
malaria he saw them now in the prisoner.

The rags he was dressed in added to the drama of his appearance--and
here the President suddenly leaned forward (the shoulders of his tunic
had stuck to the back of his chair with sweat) and he looked with
greater attention. The ragged singlet the man was wearing had some kind
of tattered frilling at the throat. His breeches had frills and tucks,
ragged but recognizable. The President sat back in his chair again; the
man was wearing a woman's underclothing. That made the case more
interesting; he might be mad, or--whatever it was, it was not the simple
case of spying he had anticipated. There might be something in his
defence.

The prosecuting officer stated the case against the prisoner; there must
be due regard to formalities, even though it involved telling the Court
facts which were perfectly well known to it. The prisoner had been seen
on the island of Prinze Eitel at dawn, and, having been promptly hunted
down and arrested, could give no account of himself. The Court was aware
of this, seeing that it had been the President of the Court who had
observed him from the deck of the _Knigin Luise_, and the other members
of the Court who had questioned him.

The prosecuting officer pointed out that on the island were kept reserve
stores of fuel for the _Knigin Luise_, which an evilly disposed person
might easily destroy; this was additional to the fact that the island
offered unrivalled opportunities for spying upon the movements of the
_Knigin Luise_. And it was hardly necessary to press these points,
because the prisoner was obviously an alien, and he had been found in an
area prohibited to all but members of the forces of His Imperial Majesty
the Kaiser and King, by a proclamation of His Excellency General Baron
von Hanneken, and so he was liable to the death penalty. The prosecuting
officer made the quite unnecessary addition that a court of two
officers, such as the one he was addressing, was perfectly competent to
award a penalty of death for espionage in a field court martial.

This peroration annoyed the President; it was almost impertinence on the
part of a mere lieutenant to tell a commander what was the extent of his
powers. He knew them already; it was by his orders that the Court had
constituted itself. The man would be giving him the information that he
was the captain of the _Knigin Luise_ next, and similar irrelevancies.
The President turned to the officer charged with the defence.

But Lieutenant Schumann was rather at a loss. He was not a very
intelligent officer, but he was the only one available. Of the _Knigin
Luise_'s six officers, one was watch-keeping on deck, and one in the
engine-room, two constituted the Court, one was prosecuting, and only
old Schumann was left for the defence. He uttered a few halting words,
and stopped, tongue-tied. He was shy when it came to public speaking.
The President of the Court looked inquiringly at the prisoner.

Allnutt was too dazed and weary and ill to take much note of his
surroundings. He was aware in a way that he was being subjected to some
sort of trial--the attitude of the two officers in their white suits
with the gold braid and buttons told him that--but he was not
specifically aware of the charges against him, nor of the penalty which
might be inflicted. He would not have cared very much anyway. Nothing
mattered much now, now that he had lost Rosie and the old _African
Queen_ was sunk and the great endeavour was at an end. He was ill, and
he almost wished he was dead.

He looked up at the President of the Court, and his eyes drifted round
to the prosecuting officer and the defending officer. Clearly they were
expecting him to say something. It was too much trouble, and they could
not understand him, anyway. He looked down at the floor again, and
swayed a little on his feet.

The President of the Court knew that it was his duty, failing anyone
else, to ascertain anything in the accused's favour. He leant forward
and tapped the table sharply with his pencil.

'What is your nationality?' he asked in German.

Allnutt looked at him stupidly.

'Belgian?' asked the President. 'English?'

At the word 'English' Allnutt nodded.

'English,' he said. 'British.'

'Your name?' asked the President in German, and then, doing his best to
remember his English, he repeated the question.

'Charles Allnutt.'

It took a long time to get that down correctly, translating the English
names of the letters into German ones.

'What--did--you--on--ve--ve--Insel?' asked the President. He could not
be surprised when the prisoner did not understand him. By a sudden
stroke of genius he realized that the man might speak Swahili, the
universal lingua franca of East and Central Africa, half Bantu, half
Arabic, the same language as he used to his native sailors. He asked the
questions again in Swahili, and he saw a gleam of understanding in the
prisoner's face. Then instantly he assumed a mask of sullen stupidity
again. The President of the Court asked again in Swahili what the
prisoner was doing on the island.

'Nothing,' said Allnutt sullenly. He was not going to own up to the
affair of the _African Queen_; he thought, anyway, that it was wiser not
to do so.

'Nothing,' he said again in reply to a fresh question.

The President of the Court sighed a little. He would have to pass
sentence of death, he could see. He had already done so once since the
outbreak of hostilities, and the wretched Arab half-caste had at his
orders swung on a gallows at the lake-side as a deterrent to other
spies--but bodies did not last long in this climate.

At that moment there was a bustle outside the tiny crowded cabin. The
door opened and a coloured petty officer came in, dragging with him a
fresh prisoner. At sight of her the President rose to his feet, stooping
under the low deck, for the prisoner was a woman, and obviously a white
woman despite her deep tan. There was a tangled mass of chestnut hair
about her face, and she wore only a single garment, which, torn open at
the bosom, revealed breasts which made the President feel uneasy.

The petty officer explained that they had found the woman on another of
the islands, and, with her, something else. He swung into view a
life-buoy, and on the life-buoy they could see the name _African Queen_.

'_African Queen_?' said the President, to himself, raking back in his
memory for something half-forgotten.

He opened the drawer in his table, and searched through a mass of papers
until he found what he sought. It was a duplicate of the notice sent by
von Hanneken to the captain of reserve. Until that moment the news of a
missing steam launch on the Upper Ulanga had had no interest at all for
the captain of the _Knigin Luise_, but now it was different. He looked
at the female prisoner, and his awkwardness about that exposed body
returned. She, too, was trying to hold the rags about her. The captain
gave a short order to the prosecuting officer, who rose and opened a
locker--the cabin in which they were was wardroom and cabin for three
officers together--and produced a white uniform jacket, into which he
proceeded to help Rose.

The making of the gesture produced a reflex of courtesy and deference in
the men; with just the same gesture they had helped women into their
opera cloaks.

'A chair,' said the Captain, and the defending officer hastened to
proffer his.

'Get out,' said the Captain to the coloured ratings, and they withdrew,
making a good deal more room in the stifling cabin.

'And now, gracious lady,' said the Captain to Rose. Already he had
guessed much. These two people must be the mechanic and the missionary's
sister; presumably they had abandoned their launch on the Upper Ulanga
and had come down in a canoe, and had been wrecked in last night's storm
when trying to cross the Lake to the Belgian Congo. He began to question
Rose in Swahili; it was an enormous relief to find, from her use of the
German variants of that language, that she actually knew a little
German--those weary days spent with grammar-book and vocabulary under
Samuel's sarcastic tutorship were bearing fruit at last.

It was far more of a surprise when it came out that Allnutt and Rose had
brought the _African Queen_ down the rapids of the Ulanga and through
the Bora delta.

'But, gracious lady--' protested the Captain.

There could be no doubting her statement, all the same. The Captain
looked at Rose and marvelled. He had heard from Spengler's own lips an
account of the rapids and the delta.

'It was very dangerous,' said the Captain.

Rose shrugged her shoulders. It did not matter. Nothing mattered now.
Although she had been glad to see him in the cabin, even her love for
Allnutt seemed to be dead, now that the _African Queen_ was lost and the
_Knigin Luise_ still ruled the Lake.

The Captain had heard about the stoicism and ability of Englishwomen;
here was a clear proof.

Anyway, there could be no question now of espionage and the death
penalty. He could not hang the one person without the other, and he
never thought for a moment of hanging Rose. He would not have done so
even if he thought her guilty; white women were so rare in Central
Africa that he would have thought it monstrous. Beyond all else, she had
brought a steam launch from the Upper Ulanga to the Lake, and that was a
feat for which he could feel professional admiration. He gazed at her
and marvelled.

'But why,' he asked, 'did not your friend here tell us?'

Rose looked round at Allnutt, and became conscious of his sick weariness
as he still stood, swaying. All her instincts were aroused now. She got
up from her chair and went to him protectively.

'He is ill and tired,' she said, and then, with indignation, 'He ought
to be in bed.'

Allnutt drooped against her, while she struggled to say in German and
Swahili just what she thought of men who could treat a poor creature
thus. She stroked his bristly face and murmured endearments to him. In
the white uniform jacket and tattered dress she made a fine figure,
despite the ravages of malaria.

'But you, madam,' said the Captain. 'You are ill, too.'

Rose did not bother to answer him.

The Captain looked round the cabin.

'The Court is dismissed,' he snapped.

His colleague, and the prosecuting officer and the defending officer
leaped up to their feet and saluted. They filed out of the cabin while
the Captain tapped on the table meditatively with his pencil and decided
on his future action. These two ought of course to be interned; that was
what von Hanneken would do if he took them into the mainland. But they
were ill, and they might die in imprisonment. It was not right that two
people who had achieved so much should die in an enemy's hands. All the
laws of chivalry dictated that he should do more than that for them. In
German Central Africa there would be small comfort for captured enemy
civilians. And what difference would one sick man and one sick woman
make to the balance of a war between two nations?

Von Hanneken would curse when he knew, but after all the Captain of the
_Knigin Luise_ was his own master on the Lake and could do what he
liked in his own ship. The Captain formed his resolve almost before the
blundering Schumann had closed the cabin door.




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


The post of Senior Naval Officer, Port Albert, Belgian Congo, was of
very new creation. It was only the night before that it had come into
being. It was a chance of war that the senior naval officer in a Belgian
port should be an English lieutenant-commander. He was standing pacing
along the jetty inspecting the preparation for sea of the squadron under
his command. Seeing that it comprised only two small motor-boats, it
seemed a dignified name for it. But those motor-boats had cost in blood
and sweat and treasure more than destroyers might have done, for they
had been sent out from England, and had been brought with incredible
effort overland through jungles, by rail and by river, to the harbour in
which they lay.

They were thirty-knot boats, and in their bows each would have--when the
mounting was completed--an automatic three-pounder gun. Thirty knots and
those guns would make short work of the _Knigin Luise_ with her maximum
of nine knots and her old-fashioned six-pounder. The
lieutenant-commander paced the jetty impatiently; he was anxious to get
to work now that the weary task of transport was completed. It was
irksome that there should remain a scrap of water on which the White
Ensign did not reign supreme. The sooner they came out on the hunt for
the _Knigin Luise_ the better. He gazed out over the Lake and stopped
suddenly. There was smoke on the horizon, and below it a white dot. As
he looked, a lieutenant came running along the jetty to him; he had
binoculars in his hand.

'That's the _Knigin Luise_ in sight, sir,' he said breathlessly, and
offered the glasses.

The lieutenant-commander stared through them at the approaching vessel.

'She's nearly hull up from the artillery observing station, sir.'

'M'm,' said the lieutenant-commander, and looked again.

'She looks as if she's expecting action from the number of flags she's
got flying,' he said. 'M'm--half a minute. That's not a German ens'n on
the foremast. It's--what do you make of it?'

The lieutenant looked through the glasses in his turn.

'I think--' he said, and looked again.

'It's a white flag,' he said at last.

'I think so too,' said the lieutenant-commander, and the two officers
looked at each other.

They had both of them heard stories--which in later years they would be
sorry that they had believed--about the misuse of the white flag by the
Germans.

'Wonder what they're after,' mused the lieutenant-commander. 'Perhaps--'

There was no need for him to explain, even if there were time. If the
Germans had heard of the arrival of the motor-boats on the lake shore
they had one last chance to maintain their command of the Lake waters. A
bold attack--for which a white flag might afford admirable cover--a
couple of well-placed shells, and the _Knigin Luise_ could resume her
unchallenged patrol of the Lake. The lieutenant-commander ran as fast as
his legs would carry him along the jetty and up the slope to the
artillery observing station. The Belgian artillery captain was there
with his field-glasses; below him in concealed emplacements were the two
mountain guns which guarded the port.

'If they're up to any monkey tricks,' said the lieutenant-commander,
'they'll catch it hot. I can lay one of those mountain guns even if
these Belgians can't.'

But the Germans had apparently no monkey tricks in mind. The
lieutenant-commander had hardly finished speaking before the _Knigin
Luise_ rounded to, broadside on to the shore, far out of range of her
six-pounder. The officers in the observing station saw a puff of white
smoke from her bow, and the report of a gun came slowly over to them.
They saw the white flag at the foremast come down half-way, and then
mount again to the masthead.

'That means they want a parley,' said the lieutenant-commander; he had
never used the word 'parley' before in his life, but it was the only one
which suited the occasion.

'I'll go,' decided the lieutenant-commander. It was not his way to send
others on dangerous duties, and there might be danger here, white flag
or no white flag.

'You stay here,' went on the lieutenant-commander to the lieutenant.
'You're in command while I'm out there. If you see any need to fire,
fire like blazes--don't mind about me. Understand?'

The lieutenant nodded.

'I'll have to go in one of those dhows,' decided the
lieutenant-commander, indicating the little cluster of native boats at
the far end of the jetty, where they had lain for months for fear of the
_Knigin Luise_, and where they now screened the activity round the
motor-boats. He stopped to sort his French sentences out.

'Mon capitaine,' he began, addressing the Belgian captain.
'Voulez-vous--'

There is no need to describe the lieutenant-commander's linguistic
achievements.

The lieutenant watched through his glasses as the dhow headed out from
shore with a native crew. The lieutenant-commander in the stern had
taken the precaution of changing his jacket for one of plain white
drill. The lieutenant watched him steer towards the gunboat, far out on
the Lake, and in appearance just like a white-painted Thames tug. Soon
the yellow sail was all he could see of the dhow; he saw it reach the
gunboat, and vanish as it was furled when the dhow ran alongside. There
was an anxious delay. Then at last the dhow's sail reappeared; she was
coming back. There came another puff of smoke as the _Knigin Luise_
fired a parting salute, and then she turned away and headed back again
towards the invisible German shore. The whole scene had a touch of the
formal chivalry of the Napoleonic wars.

When the _Knigin Luise_ was hull down over the horizon and the dhow was
close in-shore the lieutenant left his post and went down to the jetty
to meet his senior officer. The dhow ran briskly in, and the native crew
furled the sail, as she slid alongside the jetty. The
lieutenant-commander was there in the sternsheets. Lying in the bottom
of the boat were two new passengers, at whom the lieutenant stared in
surprise. One was a woman; she was dressed in a skirt of gay
canvas--once part of an awning of the _Knigin Luise_--and a white linen
jacket whose gold buttons and braid showed that it had once belonged to
a German naval officer. The other, at whom the lieutenant hardly looked,
so astonished was he at the sight of a woman, was dressed in a singlet
and shorts of the kind worn by German native ratings.

'Get a carrying party,' said the lieutenant-commander, proffering no
further explanation. 'They're pretty far gone.'

They were both of them in the feverish stage of malaria, hardly
conscious. The lieutenant had them carried up on shore, each in the
bight of a blanket, and looked round helplessly to see what he could do
with them. In the end he had to lay them in one of the tents allotted to
the English sailors, for Port Albert is only a collection of filthy
native huts.

'They'll be all right in an hour or two,' said the surgeon lieutenant
after examining them.

'Christ knows what I'm going to do with 'em,' said the
lieutenant-commander bitterly. 'This isn't the place for sick women.'

'Who the devil is she?' asked the lieutenant.

'Some missionary woman or other. The _Knigin Luise_ found her cast away
somewhere on the Lake trying to escape over here.'

'Pretty decent of the Huns to bring 'em over.'

'Yes,' said the lieutenant-commander shortly. It was all very well for a
junior officer to say that; he was not harassed as was the
lieutenant-commander by constant problems of housing and rations and
medical supplies--by all the knotty points in fact which beset a man in
command of a force whose lines of communication are a thousand miles
long.

'They may be able to give us a bit of useful information about the
Huns,' said the lieutenant.

'Can we ask them?' interposed the surgeon. 'Flag of truce and all that.
I don't know the etiquette of these things.'

'Oh, you can ask them, all right,' said the lieutenant-commander.
'There's nothing against it. But you won't get any good out of 'em. I've
never met a female devil-dodger yet who was any more use than a sick
headache.'

And when the officers came to question Rose and Allnutt about the German
military arrangements they found, indeed, that they had very little to
tell them. Von Hanneken had ringed himself about the desert, and had
mobilized every man and woman so as to be ready to strike back at any
force which came to molest him, but that the English knew already. The
surgeon asked with professional interest about the extent of sleeping
sickness among the German forces, but they could tell him nothing about
that. The lieutenant wanted to know details of the _Knigin Luise_'s
crew and equipment; neither Allnutt nor Rose could tell him more than he
knew already, more than the Admiralty and the Belgian government had
told him.

The lieutenant-commander looked for a moment beyond the battle which
would decide the mastery of the Lake, to the future when a fleet of
dhows escorted by the motor-boats would take over an invading army which
would settle von Hanneken for good and all. He asked if the Germans had
made any active preparations to resist a landing on their shore of the
Lake.

'Didn't see nothing,' said Allnutt.

Rose understood the drift of the question better.

'You couldn't land anyone where we came from,' she said. 'It's just a
delta--all mud and weed and malaria. It doesn't lead to anywhere.'

'No,' agreed the lieutenant-commander, who, like an intelligent officer,
had studied the technique of combined operations. 'I don't think I
could, if it's like that. How did you get down to the Lake, then?'

The question was only one of politeness.

'We came down the Ulanga river,' said Rose.

'Really?' It was not a matter of great interest to the
lieutenant-commander. 'I didn't know it was navigable.'

'It ain't. Corblimey, it ain't,' said Allnutt.

He would not be more explicit about it; the wells of his loquacity were
dried up by these glittering officers in their white uniforms with their
gentlemen's voices and la-di-da manners. Rose was awkward too. She did
not feel at ease with these real gentlemen either, and she was sullenly
angry with herself because of the absurd anticlimax in which all her
high hopes and high endeavour had ended. Naturally she did not know who
the officers were who were questioning her, nor what weapons they were
making ready to wield. Naval officers on the eve of an important
enterprise would not explain themselves to casual strangers.

'That's interesting,' said the lieutenant-commander, in tones which were
not in agreement with his words. 'You must let me hear about it later
on.'

He was to be excused for his lack of interest in the petty adventures of
these two excessively ordinary people who had made fools of themselves
by losing their boat. Tomorrow he had to lead a fleet into action,
achieving at this early age the ambition of every naval officer, and he
had much to think about.

'They may be all right,' said he when they came away. 'They look like
it. But on the other hand they may not. All this may be just a stunt of
old von Hanneken's to get a couple of his friends over here. I wouldn't
put it past him. They're not coming out of their tents until the
_Knigin Luise_ is sunk. They don't seem to be married, but although
they've lived together all those weeks it wouldn't be decent if the
Royal Navy stuck them in a tent together. I can't really spare another
tent. I won't have the camp arrangements jiggered up any more than they
are. As it is I've got to take a man off the work to act sentry over
them. Can't trust these Belgian natives. Not a ha'p'orth. You see to it,
Bones, old man, will you? I've got to go and have a look at _Matilda_'s
gun mounting.'




CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


The next day the _Knigin Luise_ as she steamed in solemn dignity over
the Lake she had ruled so long saw two long grey shapes come hurtling
over the water towards her, half-screened in a smother of spray. The
commander who had been President of the court martial of two days before
looked at them through his glasses as they tore along straight towards
him. Beyond the high-tossed bow waves he could see two fluttering
squares of white. He saw red crosses and a flash of gay colour in the
upper corners. They were White Ensigns, flying where no White Ensign had
ever been seen before.

'Action stations!' he snapped. 'Get that gun firing!'

The prosecuting officer ran madly to the gun; the defending officer
sprang to the wheel to oversee the coloured quartermaster and to make
sure the commander's orders were promptly obeyed. Round came the
_Knigin Luise_ to face her enemies. Her feeble gun spoke once, twice,
with pitiful slowness. H.M.S. _Matilda_ and H.M.S. _Amelia_ swerved to
one side. At thirty knots they came tearing round in a wide sweep, just
outside the longest range of that old six-pounder. The _Knigin Luise_
was slow on her helm and with a vast turning circle. She could not wheel
quick enough to keep her bows towards those flying grey shapes which
swept round her in a decreasing spiral. Their engines roared to full
throttle as they heeled over on the turn. They had four times the speed
and ten times the handiness of the old gunboat. The prosecuting officer
looking over his sights could see only their boiling wake now. He could
train the gun no farther round, and the gunboat could turn no faster.

The lieutenant-commander stood amidships in the _Matilda_. A thirty-knot
gale howled past his ears. The engine bellowed fit to deafen him, but he
eyed coolly the lessening range between him and the _Knigin Luise_, and
the curving course which was bringing his ship fast towards the enemy's
stern where there was no gun to bear. It was his duty not merely to win
the easy victory, but to see that victory was won at the smallest cost.
He looked back to see that the _Amelia_ was in her proper station,
looked at the range again, shouted an order into the ear of the man at
the wheel, and then waved his hand to the sub-lieutenant in the bows by
the gun. The three-pounder broke into staccato firing, report following
report so that the ear could hardly distinguish one sound from the next.
It was a vicious, spiteful sound, implying untold menace and danger.

The three-pounder shells began to burst about the _Knigin Luise_'s
stern. At first they merely blew holes in the thin platings and then
soon there was no plating left to explode them, and they flew on into
the bowels of the ship spreading destruction and fire everywhere, each
of them two pounds of flying metal and a pound of high explosive. The
steering gear was smashed to fragments, and the _Knigin Luise_ swerved
back suddenly from her circling course and headed on in a wavering
straight line. The lieutenant-commander in the _Matilda_ gave a new
order to the man at the wheel, and kept his boats dead astern, and from
that safe position sent the deadly little shells raking through and
through the ship from stern to bow.

The _Knigin Luise_ had not really been designed as a fighting ship; her
engines and boilers were above water-line instead of being far below
under a protective deck. Soon one of those little shells came flying
through the bulkhead, followed by another and another. There was a deep
sullen roar as the boiler was hit, and the _Knigin Luise_ was wreathed
in a cloud of steam. The engine-room staff were boiled alive in that
moment.

The lieutenant-commander in the _Matilda_ had been expecting that
moment; his cool brain had thought of everything. When he saw the steam
gush out he gave a quick order, and the roar of the _Matilda_'s engine
was stilled as the throttle closed and the engine put out of gear. When
the steam cleared away the _Knigin Luise_ was lying a helpless hulk on
the water, drifting very slowly with the remnants of her way, and the
motor-boats were lying silent, still safely astern. He looked for a sign
of surrender, but he could see none; the black-cross was still flying,
challenging the red. Something hit the water beside the _Matilda_ with a
plop and a jet of water; he could hear a faint crackling from the
_Knigin Luise_. Some heroic souls there were firing at them with
rifles, and even at a mile and a half a Mauser bullet can kill, and on
the great lakes of Africa where white men are numbered only in tens and
every white man can lead a hundred black men to battle white men's lives
are precious. He must not expose his sailors to this danger longer than
he need.

'Hell,' said the lieutenant-commander. He did not want to kill the
wretched Germans, who were achieving nothing in prolonging their
defence. 'God damn it; all right, then.'

He shouted an order to the gun's crew in the bows, and the fire
recommenced, elevated a little so as to sweep the deck. One shell killed
three coloured ratings who were lying on the deck firing with their
rifles; the prosecuting officer never knew how he escaped. Another shell
burst on the tall bridge, and killed Lieutenant Schumann, but it did not
harm the commander, who had gone down below a minute before, venturing
with his coat over his face into the scalding steam of the engine-room
to do his last duty.

'Perhaps that'll settle 'em,' said the lieutenant-commander, signalling
for fire to cease. Even three-pounder shells are troublesome to replace
over lines of communication a thousand miles long. He looked at the
_Knigin Luise_ again. She lay motionless, hazed around with smoke and
steam. There was no firing now, but the black-cross flag was still
flying, drooping in the still air.

Then the lieutenant-commander saw that she was lower in the water, and
as he noticed it the _Knigin Luise_ very suddenly fell over to one
side. The commander had done his duty; he had groped his way through the
wrecked engines to the sea cocks and had opened them.

'Hope we can save the poor beggars,' said the lieutenant-commander,
calling for full speed.

The _Matilda_ and the _Amelia_ came rushing up just as the German
ensign, the last thing to disappear, dipped below the surface. They were
in time to save all the living except the hopelessly wounded.




CHAPTER NINETEEN


There is an elation in victory, even when wounded men have to be borne
very carefully along the jetty to the hospital tent; even when a
telegraphic report has to be composed and sent to the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty; even when a lieutenant-commander of no
linguistic ability has to put together another report in French for the
Belgian governor. He could at least congratulate himself on having won a
naval victory as decisive as the Falklands or Tsu-Shima, and he could
look forward to receiving the D.S.O. and the Belgian Order of the Crown
and a step in promotion which would help to make him an Admiral some
day.

His mind was already hard at work on his new plans, busily anticipating
the time soon to come when he would escort the invading army across the
Lake. 'Strike quickly, strike hard, and keep on striking'; the sooner
the invaders were on their way the less time would von Hanneken have to
recover from this totally unexpected blow and make arrangements to
oppose a landing. The lieutenant-commander was urgent in his
representations to the senior Belgian officer on the spot, to the
Belgian headquarters, to the British headquarters in East Africa.

Yet meanwhile he could not be free from the worry of all
commanders-in-chief. That long line of communications was a dreadful
nuisance, and he had fifty bluejackets who expected English rations in
Central Africa, and now he had some captured German wounded--coloured
men mostly, it is true, but a drain on his resources all the same--on
his hands as well as some unwounded prisoners. He had to act promptly in
the matter. He sent for Rose and Allnutt.

'There's a Belgian escort going down to the coast with prisoners,' he
said, shortly. 'I'm going to send you with them. That will be all right
for you, I suppose.'

'I suppose so,' said Allnutt. Until this moment they had been people
without a future. Even the destruction of the _Knigin Luise_ had
increased that feeling of nothingness ahead.

'You'll be going to join up, I suppose,' said the lieutenant-commander.
'I can't enlist you here, of course. I can't do anything about it. But
down on the coast you'll find a British consul, at Matadi, I think, or
somewhere there. The Belgians'll put you on the right track, anyway. Any
British consul will do your business for you. As soon as you are over
your malaria, of course. They'll send you round to join one of the South
African units, I expect. So you'll be all right.'

'Yessir,' said Allnutt.

'And you, Mrs--er--Miss Sayer, isn't it?' went on the
lieutenant-commander. 'I think the West Coast's the best solution of the
problem for you, too, don't you? You can get back to England from there.
A British consul--'

'Yes,' said Rose.

'That's all right then,' said the lieutenant-commander with relief.
'You'll be starting in two or three hours.'

It was hard to expect a young officer planning the conquest of a country
half the size of Europe to devote more attention to two civilian
castaways. It was that 'Mrs--er--Miss' of the lieutenant-commander's
which really settled Rose's future--or unsettled it, if that view be
taken. When they came out of the lieutenant-commander's presence Rose
was seething with shame. Until then she had been a woman without a
future and in consequence without any real care. It was different now.
The lieutenant-commander had mentioned the possibility of a return to
England; to Rose that meant a picture of poor streets and censorious
people and prying aunts--that aunts should be prying was in Rose's
experience an essential characteristic of aunts. And it was terribly
painful to contemplate a separation from Allnutt; he had been so much to
her; she had hardly been out of his sight for weeks now; to lose him now
would be like losing a limb, even if her feelings towards him had
changed; she could not contemplate this unforeseen future of hers
without Allnutt.

'Charlie,' she said, urgently. 'We've got to get married.'

'Coo,' said Allnutt. This was an aspect of the situation he actually had
not thought of.

'We must do it as quickly as we can,' said Rose. 'A consul can marry
people. That officer in there spoke about a consul. As soon as we get to
the coast--'

Allnutt was a little dazed and stupid. This unlooked-for transfer to the
West Coast of Africa, this taken-for-granted enlistment in the South
African Forces, and now this new proposal left him with hardly a word to
say. He thought of Rose's moderate superiority in social status. He
thought about money; presumably he would receive pay in the South
African army. He thought about the girl he had married twelve years ago
when he was eighteen. She had probably been through half a dozen men's
hands by now, but there had never been a divorce and presumably he was
still married to her. Oh well, South Africa and England were a long way
apart, and she couldn't trouble him much.

'Righto, Rosie,' he said. 'Let's.'

So they left the Lake and began the long journey to Matadi and marriage.
As to whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily
decided.






[End of The African Queen, by C. S. Forester]
