The African Queen (13 page)

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 around 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 smother of foam was lowest, and 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 the 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 steerageway, 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 might 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 onto 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 at 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 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 to pump out what remained under the floor boards.

“ ’Ere I’ll do that, Rosie,” said Allnutt.

“No, you set 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 blimy,” said Allnutt. “That’s better than we could ’ave ’oped for. We ’aven’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 so 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 we 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 something 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 them 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 blacksmith’s 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 up on the bank.”

“Well, then—” said Rose, plunging more eagerly into the discussion.