The House of Pride, and Other Tales of Hawaii

Excerpt

THE HOUSE OF PRIDE

Percival Ford wondered why he had come.  He did not dance.  He did not care much for army people.  Yet he knew them all—gliding and revolving there on the broad lanai of the Seaside, the officers in their fresh-starched uniforms of white, the civilians in white and black, and the women bare of shoulders and arms.  After two years in Honolulu the Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska, and Percival Ford, as one of the big men of the Islands, could not help knowing the officers and their women.

But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf.  The army women frightened him just a little.  They were in ways quite different from the women he liked best—the elderly women, the spinsters and the bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages whom he met on church and library and kindergarten committees, who came meekly to him for contributions and advice.  He ruled those women by virtue of his superior mentality, his great wealth, and the high place he occupied in the commercial baronage of Hawaii.  And he was not afraid of them in the least.  Sex, with them, was not obtrusive.  Yes, that was it.  There was in them something else, or more, than the assertive grossness of life.  He was fastidious; he acknowledged that to himself; and these army women, with their bare shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes, their vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.

Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly, drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and asserting the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than their women.  He was always uncomfortable in the company of the army men.  They seemed uncomfortable, too.  And he felt, always, that they were laughing at him up their sleeves, or pitying him, or tolerating him.  Then, too, they seemed, by mere contiguity, to emphasize a lack in him, to call attention to that in them which he did not possess and which he thanked God he did not possess.  Faugh!  They were like their women!

In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman’s man than he was a man’s man.  A glance at him told the reason.  He had a good constitution, never was on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders; but he lacked vitality.  His was a negative organism.  No blood with a ferment in it could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow face, those thin lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes.  The thatch of hair, dust-coloured, straight and sparse, advertised the niggard soil, as did the nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just hinting the suggestion of a beak.  His meagre blood had denied him much of life, and permitted him to be an extremist in one thing only, which thing was righteousness.  Over right conduct he pondered and agonized, and that he should do right was as necessary to his nature as loving and being loved were necessary to commoner clay.

He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the lanai and the beach.  His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head away and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the Southern Cross burning low on the horizon.  He was irritated by the bare shoulders and arms of the women.  If he had a daughter he would never permit it, never.  But his hypothesis was the sheerest abstraction.  The thought process had been accompanied by no inner vision of that daughter.  He did not see a daughter with arms and shoulders.  Instead, he smiled at the remote contingency of marriage.  He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical, but as bestial.  Anybody could marry.  The Japanese and Chinese coolies, toiling on the sugar plantations and in the rice-fields, married.  They invariably married at the first opportunity.  It was because they were so low in the scale of life.  There was nothing else for them to do.  They were like the army men and women.  But for him there were other and higher things.  He was different from them—from all of them.  He was proud of how he happened to be.  He had come of no petty love-match.  He had come of lofty conception of duty and of devotion to a cause.  His father had not married for love.  Love was a madness that had never perturbed Isaac Ford.  When he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of life, he had had no thought and no desire for marriage.  In this they were alike, his father and he.  But the Board of Missions was economical.  With New England thrift it weighed and measured and decided that married missionaries were less expensive per capita and more efficacious.  So the Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry.  Furthermore, it furnished him with a wife, another zealous soul with no thought of marriage, intent only on doing the Lord’s work among the heathen.  They saw each other for the first time in Boston.  The Board brought them together, arranged everything, and by the end of the week they were married and started on the long voyage around the Horn....