The African Queen by C S Forester Read Free Book Online

prodigious kickings and splashings as Allnutt took his bath. She sat naked on the low gunwale in the stern and lowered her legs into the water. The fast current boiled around them, deliciously cool, tugging at her ankles, insidiously luring her further. She slipped over completely, holding on to the boat, trailing her length on the surface of the water. It was like paradise—ever so much better than her evening bath at the mission, in a shallow tin trough of lukewarm water, and obsessed with the continual fear that the unceasing curiosity of the natives might cause prying eyes to be peering at her through some chink or crevice in the walls.
    Then she began to pull herself out. It was not easy, what with the pull of the current and the height of the gunwale, but a final effort of her powerful arms drew her up far enough to wriggle at last over the edge. Only then did she realize that she had been quite calmly contemplating calling to Allnutt for assistance, and she felt that she ought to be disgusted with herself, but she could not manage it. She fished a towel out of her tin box of clothes and dried herself, and dressed again. It was almost dark by now, dark enough, anyway, for a firefly on the bank to be visible, and for the noises of the forest to have stilled so much that the sound of the river boiling along the banks seemed to have grown much louder.
    “Are you ready, Miss?” called Allnutt, starting to come aft.
    “Yes,” said Rose.
    “You better sleep ’ere in the stern,” said Allnutt, “case it rains. I got a couple of rugs ’ere. There ain’t no fleas in ’em.”
    “Where are you going to sleep?”
    “For’ard, Miss. I can make a sort of bed out o’ them cases.”
    “What, on the—the explosives?”
    “Yerss, Miss. Won’t do it no ’arm.”
    That was not what had called for the question. To Rose there seemed something against nature in the idea of actually sleeping on a couple of hundredweights of explosive, enough to lay a city in ruins—or to blow in the side of a ship. But she thrust the strangeness of the thought out of her mind; everything was strange now.
    “All right,” she said, briefly.
    “You cover up well,” said Allnutt, warningly. “It gets nearly cold on the river towards morning—look at the mist now.”
    A low white haze was already drifting over the surface of the river.
    “All right,” said Rose again.
    Allnutt retraced his steps into the bows, and Rose made her brief preparations for the night. She did not allow herself to think about the skins—black or white, clean or dirty—which had already been in contact with those rugs. She laid herself on the hard floor boards with the rugs about her and her head on a pillow of her spare clothing. Her mind was like a whirlpool in which circled a mad inconsequence of thoughts. Her brother had died only that morning and it seemed at least a month ago. The memory of his white face was vague although urgent. With her eyes closed, her retinas were haunted with persistent after-images of running water—water foaming round snags, and rippling over shallows, and all agleam with sunshine where the wind played upon it. She thought of the Königin Luise queening it on the lake. She thought of Allnutt, only a yard or two from her virgin bed, and of his naked body vanishing over the side of the launch. She thought again of the dead Samuel. The instant resolution which followed to avenge his death caught her on the point of going to sleep. She turned over restlessly. The flies were biting like fiends. She thought of Allnutt’s drooping cigarette, and of how she had cheated him into accompanying her. She thought of the play of the light and shade on the water when they had first anchored. And with that shifting pattern in her mind’s eye she fell asleep for good, utterly worn out.

Chapter 3

    R OSE actually contrived to sleep most of the night. It was the rain which woke her up, the rain and the thunder and lightning. It took her a