The House of Pride

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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


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.

Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union. He had been
born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat. And he
was proud of his father. It was a passion with him. The erect, austere
figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his pride. On his desk was a
miniature of that soldier of the Lord. In his bedroom hung the portrait
of Isaac Ford, painted at the time when he had served under the Monarchy
as prime minister. Not that Isaac Ford had coveted place and worldly
wealth, but that, as prime minister, and, later, as banker, he had been
of greater service to the missionary cause. The German crowd, and the
English crowd, and all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at
Isaac Ford as a commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different.
When the natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no
conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were
letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac Ford
who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and taken
possession of fat, vast holdings. Small wonder the trading crowd did not
like his memory. But he had never looked upon his enormous wealth as his
own. He had considered himself God's steward. Out of the revenues he
had built schools, and hospitals, and churches. Nor was it his fault
that sugar, after the slump, had paid forty per cent; that the bank he
founded had prospered into a railroad; and that, among other things,
fifty thousand acres of Oahu pasture land, which he had bought for a
dollar an acre, grew eight tons of sugar to the acre every eighteen
months. No, in all truth, Isaac Ford was an heroic figure, fit, so
Percival Ford thought privately, to stand beside the statue of Kamehameha
I. in front of the Judiciary Building. Isaac Ford was gone, but he, his
son, carried on the good work at least as inflexibly if not as
masterfully.

He turned his eyes back to the _lanai_. What was the difference, he
asked himself, between the shameless, grass-girdled _hula_ dances and the
decollete dances of the women of his own race? Was there an essential
difference? or was it a matter of degree?

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."

The doctor laughed at it heartily, as a joke on himself, and glanced at
the musicians under the _hau_ tree.

"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."

"But that's no reason you should keep on after him the way you do. I've
watched you from the beginning. The first thing you did when you
returned from college and found him working on the plantation as outside
_luna_ was to fire him--you with your millions, and he with his sixty
dollars a month."

"Not the first thing," Percival Ford said judicially, in a tone he was
accustomed to use in committee meetings. "I gave him his warning. The
superintendent said he was a capable _luna_. I had no objection to him
on that ground. It was what he did outside working hours. He undid my
work faster than I could build it up. Of what use were the Sunday
schools, the night schools, and the sewing classes, when in the evenings
there was Joe Garland with his infernal and eternal tum-tumming of guitar
and _ukulele_, his strong drink, and his _hula_ dancing? After I warned
him, I came upon him--I shall never forget it--came upon him, down at the
cabins. It was evening. I could hear the _hula_ songs before I saw the
scene. And when I did see it, there were the girls, shameless in the
moonlight and dancing--the girls upon whom I had worked to teach clean
living and right conduct. And there were three girls there, I remember,
just graduated from the mission school. Of course I discharged Joe
Garland. I know it was the same at Hilo. People said I went out of my
way when I persuaded Mason and Fitch to discharge him. But it was the
missionaries who requested me to do so. He was undoing their work by his
reprehensible example."

"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."

Dr. Kennedy laughed with a grating sound. "Who the devil gave it to you
to be judge and jury? Does landlordism give you control of the immortal
souls of those that toil for you? I have been your physician. Am I to
expect tomorrow your ukase that I give up Scotch and soda or your
patronage? Bah! Ford, you take life too seriously. Besides, when Joe
got into that smuggling scrape (he wasn't in your employ, either), and he
sent word to you, asked you to pay his fine, you left him to do his six
months' hard labour on the reef. Don't forget, you left Joe Garland in
the lurch that time. You threw him down, hard; and yet I remember the
first day you came to school--we boarded, you were only a day scholar--you
had to be initiated. Three times under in the swimming tank--you
remember, it was the regular dose every new boy got. And you held back.
You denied that you _could_ swim. You were frightened, hysterical--"

"Yes, I know," Percival Ford said slowly. "I was frightened. And it was
a lie, for I could swim . . . And I was frightened."

"And you remember who fought for you? who lied for you harder than you
could lie, and swore he knew you couldn't swim? Who jumped into the tank
and pulled you out after the first under and was nearly drowned for it by
the other boys, who had discovered by that time that you _could_ swim?"

"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.

"Everybody knows it," he said. "I thought you knew it. And since you
don't know it, it's time you did, and I'm glad of the chance of setting
you straight. Joe Garland and you are brothers--half-brothers."

"It's a lie," Ford cried. "You don't mean it. Joe Garland's mother was
Eliza Kunilio." (Dr. Kennedy nodded.) "I remember her well, with her
duck pond and _taro_ patch. His father was Joseph Garland, the beach-
comber." (Dr. Kennedy shook his head.) "He died only two or three years
ago. He used to get drunk. There's where Joe got his dissoluteness.
There's the heredity for you."

"And nobody told you," Kennedy said wonderingly, after a pause.

"Dr. Kennedy, you have said something terrible, which I cannot allow to
pass. You must either prove or, or . . . "

"Prove it yourself. Turn around and look at him. You've got him in
profile. Look at his nose. That's Isaac Ford's. Yours is a thin
edition of it. That's right. Look. The lines are fuller, but they are
all there."

Percival Ford looked at the Kanaka half-breed who played under the _hau_
tree, and it seemed, as by some illumination, that he was gazing on a
wraith of himself. Feature after feature flashed up an unmistakable
resemblance. Or, rather, it was he who was the wraith of that other full-
muscled and generously moulded man. And his features, and that other
man's features, were all reminiscent of Isaac Ford. And nobody had told
him. Every line of Isaac Ford's face he knew. Miniatures, portraits,
and photographs of his father were passing in review through his mind,
and here and there, over and again, in the face before him, he caught
resemblances and vague hints of likeness. It was devil's work that could
reproduce the austere features of Isaac Ford in the loose and sensuous
features before him. Once, the man turned, and for one flashing instant
it seemed to Percival Ford that he saw his father, dead and gone, peering
at him out of the face of Joe Garland.

"It's nothing at all," he could faintly hear Dr. Kennedy saying, "They
were all mixed up in the old days. You know that. You've seen it all
your life. Sailors married queens and begat princesses and all the rest
of it. It was the usual thing in the Islands."

"But not with my father," Percival Ford interrupted.

"There you are." Kennedy shrugged his shoulders. "Cosmic sap and smoke
of life. Old Isaac Ford was straitlaced and all the rest, and I know
there's no explaining it, least of all to himself. He understood it no
more than you do. Smoke of life, that's all. And don't forget one
thing, Ford. There was a dab of unruly blood in old Isaac Ford, and Joe
Garland inherited it--all of it, smoke of life and cosmic sap; while you
inherited all of old Isaac's ascetic blood. And just because your blood
is cold, well-ordered, and well-disciplined, is no reason that you should
frown upon Joe Garland. When Joe Garland undoes the work you do,
remember that it is only old Isaac Ford on both sides, undoing with one
hand what he does with the other. You are Isaac Ford's right hand, let
us say; Joe Garland is his left hand."

Percival Ford made no answer, and in the silence Dr. Kennedy finished his
forgotten Scotch and soda. From across the grounds an automobile hooted
imperatively.

"There's the machine," Dr. Kennedy said, rising. "I've got to run. I'm
sorry I've shaken you up, and at the same time I'm glad. And know one
thing, Isaac Ford's dab of unruly blood was remarkably small, and Joe
Garland got it all. And one other thing. If your father's left hand
offend you, don't smite it off. Besides, Joe is all right. Frankly, if
I could choose between you and him to live with me on a desert isle, I'd
choose Joe."

Little bare-legged children ran about him, playing, on the grass; but
Percival Ford did not see them. He was gazing steadily at the singer
under the _hau_ tree. He even changed his position once, to get closer.
The clerk of the Seaside went by, limping with age and dragging his
reluctant feet. He had lived forty years on the Islands. Percival Ford
beckoned to him, and the clerk came respectfully, and wondering that he
should be noticed by Percival Ford.

"John," Ford said, "I want you to give me some information. Won't you
sit down?"

The clerk sat down awkwardly, stunned by the unexpected honour. He
blinked at the other and mumbled, "Yes, sir, thank you."

"John, who is Joe Garland?"

The clerk stared at him, blinked, cleared his throat, and said nothing.

"Go on," Percival Ford commanded.

"Who is he?"

"You're joking me, sir," the other managed to articulate.

"I spoke to you seriously."

The clerk recoiled from him.

"You don't mean to say you don't know?" he questioned, his question in
itself the answer.

"I want to know."

"Why, he's--" John broke off and looked about him helplessly. "Hadn't
you better ask somebody else? Everybody thought you knew. We always
thought . . . "

"Yes, go ahead."

"We always thought that that was why you had it in for him."

Photographs and miniatures of Isaac Ford were trooping through his son's
brain, and ghosts of Isaac Ford seemed in the air about hint "I wish you
good night, sir," he could hear the clerk saying, and he saw him
beginning to limp away.

"John," he called abruptly.

John came back and stood near him, blinking and nervously moistening his
lips.

"You haven't told me yet, you know."

"Oh, about Joe Garland?"

"Yes, about Joe Garland. Who is he?"

"He's your brother, sir, if I say it who shouldn't."

"Thank you, John. Good night."

"And you didn't know?" the old man queried, content to linger, now that
the crucial point was past.

"Thank you, John. Good night," was the response.

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir. I think it's going to rain. Good night,
sir."

Out of the clear sky, filled only with stars and moonlight, fell a rain
so fine and attenuated as to resemble a vapour spray. Nobody minded it;
the children played on, running bare-legged over the grass and leaping
into the sand; and in a few minutes it was gone. In the south-east,
Diamond Head, a black blot, sharply defined, silhouetted its crater-form
against the stars. At sleepy intervals the surf flung its foam across
the sands to the grass, and far out could be seen the black specks of
swimmers under the moon. The voices of the singers, singing a waltz,
died away; and in the silence, from somewhere under the trees, arose the
laugh of a woman that was a love-cry. It startled Percival Ford, and it
reminded him of Dr. Kennedy's phrase. Down by the outrigger canoes,
where they lay hauled out on the sand, he saw men and women, Kanakas,
reclining languorously, like lotus-eaters, the women in white _holokus_;
and against one such _holoku_ he saw the dark head of the steersman of
the canoe resting upon the woman's shoulder. Farther down, where the
strip of sand widened at the entrance to the lagoon, he saw a man and
woman walking side by side. As they drew near the light _lanai_, he saw
the woman's hand go down to her waist and disengage a girdling arm. And
as they passed him, Percival Ford nodded to a captain he knew, and to a
major's daughter. Smoke of life, that was it, an ample phrase. And
again, from under the dark algaroba tree arose the laugh of a woman that
was a love-cry; and past his chair, on the way to bed, a bare-legged
youngster was led by a chiding Japanese nurse-maid. The voices of the
singers broke softly and meltingly into an Hawaiian love-song, and
officers and women, with encircling arms, were gliding and whirling on
the _lanai_; and once again the woman laughed under the algaroba trees.

And Percival Ford knew only disapproval of it all. He was irritated by
the love-laugh of the woman, by the steersman with pillowed head on the
white _holoku_, by the couples that walked on the beach, by the officers
and women that danced, and by the voices of the singers singing of love,
and his brother singing there with them under the _hau_ tree. The woman
that laughed especially irritated him. A curious train of thought was
aroused. He was Isaac Ford's son, and what had happened with Isaac Ford
might happen with him. He felt in his cheeks the faint heat of a blush
at the thought, and experienced a poignant sense of shame. He was
appalled by what was in his blood. It was like learning suddenly that
his father had been a leper and that his own blood might bear the taint
of that dread disease. Isaac Ford, the austere soldier of the Lord--the
old hypocrite! What difference between him and any beach-comber? The
house of pride that Percival Ford had builded was tumbling about his
ears.