It was now to do nothing, nothing whatever, and have plenty of money to do it on.  He had tasted of power, the highest form of it his limited experience was aware of—­the power of shipowning.  What a deception!  Vanity of vanities!  He wondered at his folly.  He had thrown away the substance for the shadow.  Of the gratification of wealth he did not know enough to excite his imagination with any visions of luxury.  How could he—­the child of a drunken boiler-maker—­going straight from the workshop into the engine-room of a north-country collier!  But the notion of the absolute idleness of wealth he could very well conceive.  He reveled in it, to forget his present troubles; he imagined himself walking about the streets of Hull (he knew their gutters well as a boy) with his pockets full of sovereigns.  He would buy himself a house; his married sisters, their husbands, his old workshop chums, would render him infinite homage.  There would be nothing to think of.  His word would be law.  He had been out of work for a long time before he won his prize, and he remembered how Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley), the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, had cringed joyfully before him in the evening, when the news had come.  Poor Charley, though he made his living by ministering to various abject vices, gave credit for their food to many a piece of white wreckage.  He was naively overjoyed at the idea of his old bills being paid, and he reckoned confidently on a spell of festivities in the cavernous grog-shop downstairs.  Massy remembered the curious, respectful looks of the “trashy” white men in the place.  His heart had swelled within him.  Massy had left Charley’s infamous den directly he had realized the possibilities open to him, and with his nose in the air.  Afterwards the memory of these adulations was a great sadness.

This was the true power of money,—­and no trouble with it, nor any thinking required either.  He thought with difficulty and felt vividly; to his blunt brain the problems offered by any ordered scheme of life seemed in their cruel toughness to have been put in his way by the obvious malevolence of men.  As a shipowner everyone had conspired to make him a nobody.  How could he have been such a fool as to purchase that accursed ship.  He had been abominably swindled; there was no end to this swindling; and as the difficulties of his improvident ambition gathered thicker round him, he really came to hate everybody he had ever come in contact with.  A temper naturally irritable and an amazing sensitiveness to the claims of his own personality had ended by making of life for him a sort of inferno—­a place where his lost soul had been given up to the torment of savage brooding.