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Read Ebook: The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii by London Jack
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Ebook has 432 lines and 34552 words, and 9 pages
THE HOUSE OF PRIDE
Contents:
The House of Pride Koolau the Leper Good-bye, Jack Aloha Oe Chun Ah Chun The Sheriff of Kona Jack London
THE HOUSE OF PRIDE
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.
As he pondered the problem a hand rested on his shoulder.
"Hello, Ford, what are you doing here? Isn't this a bit festive?"
"I try to be lenient, Dr. Kennedy, even as I look on," Percival Ford answered gravely. "Won't you sit down?"
Dr. Kennedy sat down, clapping his palms sharply. A white-clad Japanese servant answered swiftly.
Scotch and soda was Kennedy's order; then, turning to the other, he said:--
"Of course, I don't ask you."
"But I will take something," Ford said firmly. The doctor's eyes showed surprise, and the servant waited. "Boy, a lemonade, please."
"Why, it's the Aloha Orchestra," he said. "I thought they were with the Hawaiian Hotel on Tuesday nights. Some rumpus, I guess."
His eyes paused for a moment, and dwelt upon the one who was playing a guitar and singing a Hawaiian song to the accompaniment of all the instruments.
His face became grave as he looked at the singer, and it was still grave as he turned it to his companion.
"Look here, Ford, isn't it time you let up on Joe Garland? I understand you are in opposition to the Promotion Committee's sending him to the States on this surf-board proposition, and I've been wanting to speak to you about it. I should have thought you'd be glad to get him out of the country. It would be a good way to end your persecution of him."
"Persecution?" Percival Ford's eyebrows lifted interrogatively.
"Call it by any name you please," Kennedy went on. "You've hounded that poor devil for years. It's not his fault. Even you will admit that."
"Not his fault?" Percival Ford's thin lips drew tightly together for the moment. "Joe Garland is dissolute and idle. He has always been a wastrel, a profligate."
"Afterwards, when he got on the railroad, your railroad, he was discharged without cause," Kennedy challenged.
"Not so," was the quick answer. "I had him into my private office and talked with him for half an hour."
"You discharged him for inefficiency?"
"For immoral living, if you please."
"Yes, I know," Percival Ford said slowly. "I was frightened. And it was a lie, for I could swim . . . And I was frightened."
"Of course I know," the other rejoined coldly. "But a generous act as a boy does not excuse a lifetime of wrong living."
"He has never done wrong to you?--personally and directly, I mean?"
"No," was Percival Ford's answer. "That is what makes my position impregnable. I have no personal spite against him. He is bad, that is all. His life is bad--"
"Which is another way of saying that he does not agree with you in the way life should be lived," the doctor interrupted.
"Have it that way. It is immaterial. He is an idler--"
"With reason," was the interruption, "considering the jobs out of which you have knocked him."
"He is immoral--"
"Oh, hold on now, Ford. Don't go harping on that. You are pure New England stock. Joe Garland is half Kanaka. Your blood is thin. His is warm. Life is one thing to you, another thing to him. He laughs and sings and dances through life, genial, unselfish, childlike, everybody's friend. You go through life like a perambulating prayer-wheel, a friend of nobody but the righteous, and the righteous are those who agree with you as to what is right. And after all, who shall say? You live like an anchorite. Joe Garland lives like a good fellow. Who has extracted the most from life? We are paid to live, you know. When the wages are too meagre we throw up the job, which is the cause, believe me, of all rational suicide. Joe Garland would starve to death on the wages you get from life. You see, he is made differently. So would you starve on his wages, which are singing, and love--"
"Lust, if you will pardon me," was the interruption.
Dr. Kennedy smiled.
"Love, to you, is a word of four letters and a definition which you have extracted from the dictionary. But love, real love, dewy and palpitant and tender, you do not know. If God made you and me, and men and women, believe me He made love, too. But to come back. It's about time you quit hounding Joe Garland. It is not worthy of you, and it is cowardly. The thing for you to do is to reach out and lend him a hand."
"Why I, any more than you?" the other demanded. "Why don't you reach him a hand?"
"I have. I'm reaching him a hand now. I'm trying to get you not to down the Promotion Committee's proposition of sending him away. I got him the job at Hilo with Mason and Fitch. I've got him half a dozen jobs, out of every one of which you drove him. But never mind that. Don't forget one thing--and a little frankness won't hurt you--it is not fair play to saddle another fault on Joe Garland; and you know that you, least of all, are the man to do it. Why, man, it's not good taste. It's positively indecent."
"Now I don't follow you," Percival Ford answered. "You're up in the air with some obscure scientific theory of heredity and personal irresponsibility. But how any theory can hold Joe Garland irresponsible for his wrongdoings and at the same time hold me personally responsible for them--more responsible than any one else, including Joe Garland--is beyond me."
"It's a matter of delicacy, I suppose, or of taste, that prevents you from following me," Dr. Kennedy snapped out. "It's all very well, for the sake of society, tacitly to ignore some things, but you do more than tacitly ignore."
"What is it, pray, that I tacitly ignore!"
Dr. Kennedy was angry. A deeper red than that of constitutional Scotch and soda suffused his face, as he answered:
"Your father's son."
"Now just what do you mean?"
"Damn it, man, you can't ask me to be plainer spoken than that. But if you will, all right--Isaac Ford's son--Joe Garland--your brother."
Percival Ford sat quietly, an annoyed and shocked expression on his face. Kennedy looked at him curiously, then, as the slow minutes dragged by, became embarrassed and frightened.
"My God!" he cried finally, "you don't mean to tell me that you didn't know!"
As in answer, Percival Ford's cheeks turned slowly grey.
"It's a ghastly joke," he said; "a ghastly joke."
The doctor had got himself in hand.
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