It was the other kind of roughness in which resided no warm affection, no heart-touch of love.
Jerry did not quite understand, but he sensed the difference and resented, without expressing in action, the wrongness and unfairness of it.

So he stood, after regaining balance, and soberly regarded, in a vain effort to understand, the mate with a bottle-bottom inverted skyward, the mouth to his lips, the while his throat made gulping contractions and noises.

And soberly he continued to regard the mate when he went aft and threatened to knock the "Song of Songs" and the rest of the Old Testament out of the black helmsman whose smile of teeth was as humbly gentle and placating as Jerry's had been when he made his appeal.
Leaving this god as a god unliked and not understood, Jerry sadly trotted back to the companionway and yearned his head over the combing in the direction in which he had seen Skipper disappear.

What bit at his consciousness and was a painful incitement in it, was his desire to be with Skipper who was not right, and who was in trouble.

He wanted Skipper.