The House of Pride | Page 2

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.