The African Queen (22 page)

“Charlie,” she said, and her voice was gentle.

“Yerss, old girl?”

“You must start getting those torpedoes ready. To-morrow 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 you, 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
Königin 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 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 that 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
Königin 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
Königin Luise
one of them would jump overboard with the lifebuoy; 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, there was a bundle of faint lights which were neither stars not 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 earthbound 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 have not 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.

I
N
the morning they saw the
Königin 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 prized 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 around 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 foredeck 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 floorboards. 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 lot o’ gold on board ’ere going up to Limbasi sometimes. A nundred 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, 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 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 nailheads, 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 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; and there were two cylinders, each containing nearly a hundredweight of explosive—one cylinder, let alone two, ought to settle a little ship like the
Königin Luise
.