“If the Army and Navy men would only take the trouble to read their own official sheets,” Jack would fume. “But they don’t know their own papers. How am I going to tell them all, separately, that I didn’t write a word of the thing! I deny, and deny, and deny, until I am tired, and what good does it do, when they don’t see the denials?” For in the Army and Navy Register, as well as the Journal, and in the general press, he had repeatedly disclaimed authorship of the canard.
Also I found a silly impression persisting among the Army women:
“Your husband does not like us,” they voiced their belief. “He made derogatory remarks about Army women in ‘The House of Pride.’”
Jack fairly sizzled, with despairing arms flaying the air: “Don’t mind my violence—I always talk with my hands—it’s my French, I guess.—But these people make me tired. If they’d only really read what they think they’re reading. Because I have a bloodless, sexless, misanthropic, misogamistic mysogynist disapprove of décolleté and dancing, and all and every other social diversion and custom, I myself am saddled with these unnatural peculiarities. A merry hell of a lot of interesting characters there would be in fiction if they all talked alike and agreed with one another and their author!—What’s a poor devil of a writer to do, anyway?” he repeated his wail of nine years earlier, at Pearl Lochs when “The Iron Heel” had been rejected of men. “Of course I like Army women—just as I like other women!”
On New Year’s Eve, we attended a reception in the Throne Room of the old Palace, where Queen Liliuokalani sat at Governor Pinkham’s right hand. “And it’s the first time in over twenty years that Her Majesty has received in this room,” he whispered his satisfaction with what he had been able to bring about.
Followed a great military ball in the Armory, dinner and dance at the Country Club, and a wild night of fun at Heinie’s. Nowhere in the world could there be such a New Year as in this subtropical paradise. Rain it did, and bountifully—a tepid torrent of liquid jewels in the many-colored lights of the city streets, which kept no Pierrot nor Pierrette indoors. The very gutters ran colored streams, what of the showers of confetti.
“Can you surpass it?” Jack murmured when, at dawn, the machine threshed hub-deep in water down our long driveway under vine-clambered coco-palms, to the ceaseless rhythmic impact of a big gray surf upon our sea wall.
Carnival Week was in February—a succession of pageantry opening with the Mardi Gras. No one with steamer-fare in pocket should forego Carnival season in Honolulu. It grew originally out of Washington’s Birthday observance, and has become an institution.
Polo, the best in the world, automobile races, equine races, took place at Kapiolani Park, with Diamond Head spilling unwonted waterfalls down the unwontedly green truncations of its steep flanks; and there were aquatic contests at the harborside, where Duke Kahanamoku added more emblems to his shield than he lost, and where Mayor Lane’s slim kinswoman, Lucile Legros, won over Frances Cowells from the Coast. And Jack and I could not refrain from working, with every nerve of desire, on behalf of our Hawaiians in their own waters!
The military reviews were especially imposing. The showing of the national guard, rated as second to none in the union, surpassed that of the regulars; while it was declared that the cadets of the Kamehameha School for Hawaiians, founded by Mrs. Bernice Pauahi Bishop, put both regulars and militia in the shade. The work that had been done with the Boy Scouts was evidenced by the orderly discharge of their Carnival duties in maintaining order. That fabled red hill, Punch Bowl, sprouted with verdure, its shallow crater now become the cradle of Boy Scout encampments, their staunch khaki bringing together unnumbered nationalities into the fine automatic usefulness and courtesy of a discipline one dreams of some day belonging to civil rather than military procedure.