The African Queen by C S Forester Read Free Book Online Page A

little while to think where she was, lying there in the dark on those terribly hard floor boards. All round her was an inferno of noise. The rain was pouring down as it can only in Central Africa. It was drumming on the awning over her, and streaming in miniature waterfalls from the trees above into the river. The lightning was lighting up brilliantly even this dark backwater, and the thunder roared almost without intermission. A warm wind came sweeping along the backwater, blowing the launch upstream a little, so that whenever it dropped for a moment the pull of the current brought her back with a jerk against her moorings like a small earthquake. Almost at once Rose felt the warm rain on her face, blown in by the wind under the awning, and then the awning began to leak, discharging little cataracts of water on to the floor boards round her.
    It all seemed to happen at once—one moment she was asleep, and the next she was wet and uncomfortable, and the launch was tugging at her anchor chain. Something moved in the waist of the launch, and the lightning revealed Allnutt crawling towards her, very wet and miserable, dragging his bedding with him. He came pattering up beside her, whimpering, for all the world like a little dog. The leaky awning shot a cataract of water down his neck.
    “Coo!” he said, and shifted his position abruptly.
    By some kind of chance, Rose’s position was such that none of these direct streams descended upon her; she was only incommoded by the rain in the wind and the splashes from the floor boards. But that was the only space under the awning as well-protected. Allnutt spent much time moving abruptly here and there, with the pitiless streams searching him out every time. Rose heard his teeth chattering as he came near her, and was for a moment minded to put out her arm and draw him to her like a child; she blushed secretly at discovering such a plan in her mind, for Allnutt was no more a child than she was.
    Instead, she sat up and asked—
    “What can we do?”
    “N-nothing, Miss,” said Allnutt, miserably and definitely.
    “Can’t you shelter anywhere?”
    “No, Miss. But this won’t last long.”
    Allnutt spoke with the spiritless patience bred by a lifetime’s bad luck. He moved out of one stream of water into another. Samuel, in the same conditions, would have displayed a trace of bad temper—Rose had to measure men by Samuel’s standard, because she knew no other man so well.
    “You poor man!” said Rose.
    “You poor chap” or “You poor old thing” might have sounded more comradely or sympathetic, but Rose had never yet spoken of men as “chaps” or “old things.”
    “I’m so sorry,” said Rose, but Allnutt only shifted uncomfortably again.
    Then the storm passed as quickly as it came. In a country where it rains an inch in an hour, an annual rainfall of two hundred inches means only two hundred hours’ rain a year. For a little while the trees above still tossed and roared in the wind, and then the wind died away, and there was a little light in the backwater, and with the stillness of dawn the sound of the river coursing through the tree roots overshadowed every other noise. The day came with a rush, and for once the sun and the heat were beneficent and life-giving, instead of being malignant tyrants. Rose and Allnutt roused themselves; the whole backwater steamed like a laundry.
    “What’s to be done before we move on?” asked Rose. It did not occur to her that there was anything they might do instead of moving on. Allnutt scratched at his sprouting beard.
    “Got no wood,” he said. “ ’Ave to fill up with thet. Plenty of dead stuff ’ere, I should fink. An’ we’ll ’ave to pump out. The ole boat leaks anyways, an’ wiv all this rine—”
    “Show me how to do that.”
    So Rose was introduced to the hand pump, which was as old and as inefficient as everything else on board. In theory one stuck the foot of it down between the skin and the floor