The House of Pride, and Other Tales of Hawaii by Jack LondonPercival
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.
