The African Queen

by C. S. Forester

  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 Königin Luise.

  Allnutt was at her side. He was putting her arm through the huge lumbering lifebuoy 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 cold 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 Königin 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 an another inland sea, that of Galilee.

  Chapter 16

  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 Kurfürstendamm 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 Prinz 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 Königin Luise, and the other member of the Court who had questioned him.

  The prosecuting officer pointed out that on the island were kept reserve stores of fuel for the Königin 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 Königin 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 Königin 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 Königin 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, or 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 any one 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. “Englicsh?”

  At the word “Englisch” 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 realised 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 question 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 lakeside 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 lifebuoy, and on the lifebuoy they could see the name African Queen.

  “African Queen!” said the President to himself, raking back 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 Königin 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 Königin 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 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 around 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 the 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 Königin 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 17

  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 Königin 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 Königin 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 Königin 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,” said the lieutenant.

  “M’m,” said the lieutenant-commander, and looked again.

  “She looks as if she’s expecting action from the number of flags she’s 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 Königin 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 Königin 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 the
m. They saw the white flag at the foremast come down halfway, 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 Königin 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 Königin 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.