The African Queen Read Free Page B

Lake while the Louisa’s there.”
    “That’s true enough,” agreed Rose.
    The Königin Luise , whose name Allnutt characteristically anglicised to Louisa , was the police steamer which the German government maintained on the Lake. Rose remembered when she had been brought up from the coast, overland, in sections, eight years before. The country had been swept for bearers and workmen then as now, for there bad been roads to hack through the forest, and enormous burdens to be carried. The Königin Luise ’s boiler needed to be transported in one piece, and every furlong of its transport had cost the life of a man in the forest. Once she had been assembled and launched, however, she had swept the Lake free immediately from the canoe pirates who had infested its waters from time immemorial. With her ten-knot speed she could run down any canoe fleet, and with her six-pounder gun she could shell any pirate village into submission, so that commerce had begun to develop on the lake, and agriculture had begun to spread along such of its shores as were not marshy, and the Königin Luise , turning for the moment her sword into a ploughshare, had carried on such an efficient mail and passenger service across the lake that the greater part of German Central Africa was now more accessible from the Atlantic coast, across the whole width of the Belgian Congo, than from the Indian Ocean.
    Yet, it was a very significant lesson in sea power that the bare mention of the name of the Königin Luise was sufficient to convince two people with a wide experience of the country, like Rose and Allnutt, of the impregnability of German Central Africa on the side of the Congo. No invasion whatever could be pushed across the lake in the face of a hundred-ton steamer with a six-pounder popgun. Germany ruled the waters of the lake as indisputably as England ruled those of the Straits of Dover, and the advantage to Germany which could be derived from this localized sea power was instantly obvious to the two in the launch.
    “If it wasn’t for the Louisa ,” said Allnutt, “there wouldn’t be no trouble here. Old Von ’Anneken couldn’t last a month if they could get at him across the Lake. But as it is—”
    Allnutt’s gesture indicated that, screened on the other three sides by the forest, Von Hanneken might prolong his resistance indefinitely. Allnutt tapped his cigarette with his finger, so that the ash fell down on his dirty white coat. That saved the trouble of detaching the cigarette from his lip.
    “But all this doesn’t get us any nearer ’ome, does it, Miss? But b-bless me if I can fink what we can do.”
    “We must do something for England,” said Rose instantly. She would have said “We must do our bit,” if she had been acquainted with the wartime slang which was at that moment beginning to circulate in England. But what she said meant the same thing, and it did not sound too melodramatic in the African forest.
    “Coo!” said Allnutt.
    His notion had been to put the maximum possible distance between himself and the struggle; he had taken it for granted that this war, like other wars, should be fought by the people paid and trained for the purpose. Out of touch with the patriotic fervour of the press, nothing had been farther from his thoughts than that he should interfere. Even his travels, which had necessarily been extensive, had not increased his patriotism beyond the point to which it had been brought by the waving of a penny Union Jack on Empire Day at his board school; perhaps they had even diminished it—it would be tactless to ask by what road and for what reasons an Englishman came to be acting as a mechanic-of-all-work on a Belgian concession in a German colony; it was not the sort of question anyone asked, not even missionaries nor their sisters.
    “Coo!” said Allnutt again. There was something infectious, something inspiring, about the notion of “doing something for England.”
    But after a moment’s