It didn’t take Drevis long to get aboard the Queen Eleanor, a British tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok.  He accosted the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly.

“Yes,” says the chief, “I need a mess-room steward right away—­we sail at four o’clock.”

“Try me!” pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!)

The chief roars with laughter.

“Too small!” he says.

Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward.

“Well,” says the chief, “go home and put on a pair of long pants and come back again.  Then we’ll see how you look!”

Tommy ran home rejoicing.  His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy grabbed a pair of his trousers.  Thus fortified, he hastened back to the Queen Eleanor.  The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds five a month.

Tommy didn’t last long as mess-room boy.  He broke so many cups the engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin boy at a pound a month.  Even as cabin boy he was no instant success.  He used to forget to empty the chief’s slop-pail, and the water would overflow the cabin.  He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer’s cabin boy.

“Drevis” was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened him “Tommy,” and that handle turns him still.

Tommy’s blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him friendly with all the world.  The winds of chance sent him scudding about the globe, a true casual of the seas.  His first voyage as A.B. was on the Fernfield in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer.  This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and Tommy’s guileless phiz attracted him.  Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster.

One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer had in his cabin.  A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or “The Duchess” would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not.  And what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important role!

The years went by.  On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook’s helper, Tommy drifted about the world.  One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht Alvina. He was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral in those days) signed on to take a millionaire’s pet plaything across the wintry ocean.  She had been sold to the Russian Government (there still was one then!)