The Sauciest Boy in the Service: A Story of Pluck and Perseverance

There were few things that gave Kep Drummond more real pleasure than the graphic little descriptions of sea-scapes which occurred every here and there in the boys' stories he read. He knew the true from the false, and avoided tales by authors who had probably never been further from shore than one could pitch a biscuit.

Oh, if ever the glamour of old ocean had got right round a lad's heart and altered all his life and thoughts, that lad was Kep Drummond. The passages he chiefly delighted in were those that seemed to bring the scene right up before the boy's mind's eye, like pictures from a magic lantern. Though but little over fourteen years of age, he had a wonderful imagination and was full to the brim with the poetry of true feeling. En rapport, in fact, with all that is charming in nature, part and parcel of all the life and love he could see around him on such a sunny summer's day as that on which I now present him for the first time to my readers' notice.

Seated he is on the high and grassy top of a rocky cliff that beetles over what he calls his own sea, because the land all around here belongs to his father. Those tremendous rocks are the guardians of his father's Cornish estate. Behind him stretch wild moorlands and rising hills, while down below--peeping over the greenery of elm woods--red rise the turrets of what the boy knows as home.

But he leans his back against a hillock of tasseled turf, and opens a book; and as he reads his thoughts, his dreams, fly straight away through space, six thousand miles and over to the sylvan-bound silver sands of the Indian Ocean. And this is what he is reading: "How windless and warm it is! One's shoes take up the pitch and soil the ivory-white quarter-deck. We are only a gun-boat, but there isn't a yard-arm one inch out of the square, a rope's end uncoiled, nor a capstan bar awry; the wood work scintillates, the brass work shines like burnished gold, and our guns have the shimmer of papier mache. But our men to-day all look fagged and lazy. They are sun-weary. Yet every Jack amongst them is as neatly dressed as if he were about to take part in a nautical opera.

"The water round the ship, which is lying at anchor, is clearer to-day than gum copal. Five fathoms beneath we can see the bottom well; see the coral rocks, see patches of coral sand and the ever waving mysterious-looking seaweed, the home of crustaceans black or blue and grey, and of curious fishes that glide and dart, clad in every colour of the rainbow.

"Nearer the surface are scores and scores of splendid medusae or jelly-fishes; under their waving limbs glint and radiate rubies, emeralds and sapphires. On this brightest day of tropical sunshine they float lazily along with the tide, but they are perilously near to the shore, and hundreds will be stranded on the beach. Many a little azure nautilus or 'Portuguese man o' war' sails hither and thither on the gently-heaving waves.

"Seawards, if we look, the ocean's breast is flecked and patched with tender graze greens and with opal tints, but towards the horizon it is as blue as the sky itself. Landwards, in long white lines, the breakers roll in on the snow-white sands that are at present all but deserted by both negro and Somali, who will sleep in the shadows till the sun sinks lower and lower and kisses the sea good-night. Yonder are the silvery house-blocks of Zanzibar, but the flags on the various consulates droop listlessly roofwards, and our own white ensign is almost trailing in the waters astern."

Kep closes the book, closes his eyes, too, but he is not going to sleep, but only just to day-dream, and his long brown fingers keeps the place for him.

There is the thunder of waves beneath the cliffs leaping lion-like on the black and weed-trailed rocks; there is the scream of the British sea-mew too, and the long lorn wail of many another sea-bird that floats all day 'twixt sky and sea. They are all the boy's friends and favourites, and when at morn or noon he dashes into the water and breasts the billows far off the shore, they fly friendly around his head, or float so white and near he might almost touch their paddling feet.

The glamour of the ocean!

Yes, and all things of the ocean that he has ever seen or read about appeal to Kep. Realities, I mean. He thinks himself a man, and would be ashamed to recite "The boy stood on the burning deck." That was sheer nonsense. Why could he not have leapt into the blue bosom of kindly Mother Ocean? That is what Kep would have done. Some of the folk lore of the sea, however, still enamoured him. He wanted to believe, or liked to believe, there were real mermaids and sirens also, that sung by night on the rocks of fairy islands to lure the unsuspecting mariners to their doom.

But there were real sea-poems, that night after night in his turret chamber among the elm trees he loved to fall asleep thinking about.

Well for Kep Drummond, I ween, that he had such little sea-poems to call upon, especially during the long dark nights of winter, for he was a somewhat excitable brainful boy. His chamber was an eerie one, but he had chosen it himself chiefly for that very eerieness. After bidding his father good-night and kissing Madge, his sister, and her pet Newfoundland, Bounder, he had to climb high, high up the winding stone stairs. There was said to be a ghost at Martello Castle, as the place was called, and if by any chance you had met the pensive dark-eyed boy, candle in hand, in the narrow stairway, you might have been somewhat startled.

The room itself was not large, and it was round. Kep's hammock was slung at one end near to two long narrow windows, and in winter time the leafless fingers of the elm-trees had an uncanny way of tapping on the panes. There were no blinds to these windows, because the boy liked to see out when skies were clear and stars shone, or the moon glinted laughingly through the branches.

One night as Kep was going to bed he met old Elspet coming down. A faithful old retainer she, but to-night her eyes were round and glassy, and the very flaps of her mob-cap seemed to have been stiffened with fear.

"Go not up, Keppie, darling; there is that in your room no boy should see!"

"Oh, if it is the ghost," cried Kep, "here's a boy who does want to see it, badly."

She tried to hold him. "It was a white face glaring in through the black, dark window!" she hissed. But Kep was off. She might as well have tried to restrain an eel.

The window was dark certainly, and yonder sure enough was the white face.

No ghost though, only the wondering eyes of a great white owl that often came to see the boy, for he laid up a little store of meat for this strange visitor, and sometimes a dead mouse or rat.

"It's you, is it?" said Kep, throwing open the casement. "Come in, Bob, and have your supper."

And Bob did. He ate and seemed thankful, and then spread his great white wings and flew out into the night and the darkness, taking the largest piece of meat with him.

As, like a true manly boy, Kep slept with open windows, and didn't put his light out until he had done reading by his small table, great bats often flew in, and did not leave until the candle was extinguished. Then seeing a distant star perhaps, they flew out towards that.

In this turret chamber Kep was high above the rookery, and could in February look down into the nests. But the birds all knew Kep.

When the boy tired of reading, then he crept into bed. He said his prayers, repeated some Latin hymns to himself, and soon after that--the sea-poems. One after another these sea-poems of his used to spread themselves out before him, and indeed he seemed part and parcel of the poem itself, and is it any wonder that he should go to sleep right in the middle of one of them, the waking thoughts merging into delightful sea, seldom terrifying, dreams, and these into the sweetest, soundest kind of sleep that any young lad e'er enjoyed.

Mermaids were not realities. They belonged to the folk-lore of the ocean. Yet there were some nights he used to delight to dwell with them in their diamond-lit caves far down among the brown trailing sea-weed. He would imagine their revels and mingle with sea-fairies in their gladsome dances, or sit on rocks full fifty fathoms deep with strange wee water babies, listening to their stories or telling them stories of his own. Meanwhile there would be music everywhere in those fairy submarine gardens, for even the floating sea-weed emitted sweet sounds; the very sand was musical, and from under rocks or from caves came the songs of the sea-folk and the tinkle of lutes. And down there the mermaid peoples dwelt and would dwell ever and ever and ever, always, always happy and gay.

But the scene is changed--it is another sea-poem, but true, and tells its own story of the wonders of the mighty deep. For sailors who had been to the far-off northern seas had told him that oft-times when the ship was becalmed in a lonely expanse of ocean, mayhap a thousand miles wide, a solitary whale would be sighted, rising and falling on the sea's dark bosom, but heading steadily southwards, never varying a single point. What guided the lonesome leviathan? What story had it to tell could it but speak? Had it no friends? Had the great beast been deserted by all it had loved, and was it, with the sorrow of night at its heart, moving, sailing, plunging southwards and southwards, reckless, forsaken, unheeding, to be stranded on a reef and to die?

Mother Carey's chickens, the stormy petrels, were another sea-poem to Kep. He could see in his mind's eye the rise and fall of the stern of a big black ship, the quickly obliterated wake, the spume of a wind-tortured ocean, and across and across, darting over, darting under, these mysterious chips of darkness, the petrels, and he could hear their quick sharp shriek--was it a song or was it a wail? Did it portend joy to the crew, or sorrow and a sailor's grave? Bird of mystery! Ah, yes, but what a poem!

A shoal of porpoises. They seemed always busy always merry--diving, gambolling around a ship on voyage. Then dashing off again or disappearing over the horizon, followed by blessings from the seamen for the luck they always bring.

These are but samples of this strange boy's sea-poems. He would hear many more before he left his teens.

But now on the grassy cliff-top, Kep sits up once more and continues his story. Not for very long, however, because over the cliff-top yonder, or from, some part of the precipice itself, he can hear a young voice hailing him. Then two great black paws, like those of a bear, claw at the cliff-brink. There is a serious black face with a long pink tongue and flashing ivory teeth between these paws, and, dropping his book, Kep dashes forward and at some risk to himself seizes Bounder's collar and brings the noble fellow to bank.

Then, facing the sea, the dog stands up to bark at Kep and towards the cliff.

"Poor Madge is down yonder," he seems to say. "Aren't you going to help her up also?"

But wild Madge needs no help. Next minute, with her lustrous black eyes a-sparkle, her cheeks aglow with exercise and pleasure, she stands beside her brother.