The African Queen

by C. S. Forester

  “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 Allnut. “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.

  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 again like the corkscrew 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 serppose?” 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 Allnutt 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 lun
gs, 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.

  The 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 underwater 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 these 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.