 gained. As the days went
by, Smoke's prophecy was verified. The Cockney became more humble and slavish to
me than even to Wolf Larsen. I mistered him and sirred him no longer, washed no
more greasy pots, and peeled no more potatoes. I did my own work, and my own
work only, and when and in what fashion I saw fit. Also, I carried the dirk in a
sheath at my hip, sailor-fashion, and maintained toward Thomas Mugridge a
constant attitude which was composed of equal parts of domineering, insult, and
contempt.
 

                                   Chapter X

My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases - if by intimacy may be denoted those
relations which exist between master and man, or, better yet, between king and
jester. I am to him no more than a toy, and he values me no more than a child
values a toy. My function is to amuse, and so long as I amuse all goes well; but
let him become bored, or let him have one of his black moods come upon him, and
at once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while, at the same time, I am
fortunate to escape with my life and a whole body.
    The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a
man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.
He seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him and that seems never
to have found adequate expression in works. He is as Lucifer would be, were that
proud spirit banished to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.
    This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he is
oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, I review the old
Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. The white-skinned, fair-haired
savages who created that terrible pantheon were of the same fibre as he. The
frivolity of the laughter-loving Latins is no part of him. When he laughs it is
from a humor that is nothing else than ferocious. But he laughs rarely; he is
too often sad. And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race. It
is the race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,
clean-lived, and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection, has
culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.
    In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been religion
in its more agonizing forms
