The African Queen (2 page)

“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 due solely 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 which 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 into 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 daydreaming. 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 verandah of the bungalow and saw Opportunity peering cautiously at her from the edge of the clearing. She did not recognise 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 recognised 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 onto the verandah and waved a welcome to Allnutt.

A
LLNUTT
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 daresay.”

“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 realised 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.”

Rose pulled herself together.

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

Allnutt came out on the verandah 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 feet 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 overside 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 this 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 from it here, there, and everywhere. 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 dashed back 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.