T. S. Stribling

“ I must admit I never spent so uncomfortable a night as that one following Pompalone's adventure with the blue girl. He rang me up to his great bedroom, and I sat on a white-leather couch, now half asleep, now fully awake, as he strode up and down the crimson carpet and talked or swore or muttered or ordered me to do this or that. At one moment he would say: 'No; this is an end! I won't go back!' At another he would seize my shoulder and order: 'Wong Loo, get the fastest motor-boat in the Port au Spain. I will want to escape to the delta to-morrow—fast! ”

“ Will you waste your time in the lonely business of traveling for pleasure, and find all the real men in the world too busy to amuse you? Or will you go about the strange adventure of hunting out a great woman and founding a noble family, a memorable line, such as the Rothschilds or the Vanderbilts or the Astors—only, Wong Loo, I would not have my line so cold and mercantile as these. ”

“ Why should Pompalone, an adventurer and a criminal out of the Orinoco delta, make the mad experiment of storming the careful English circle of Trinidad when he owned several million bolivars whose possession he could not explain?
I did not attempt to elucidate the point. I hold no brief either for the East or the West, or for any of the numberless countries whose nationals have drained into the human olla podrida of Trinidad. I know each country believes in its own heart that it is the finest and greatest of all. If it be a conquering country, its music is major ”

“ He would tell the girl about Weck, about his outlawed palace; he would explain that he came by his wealth partly by craft, partly by oil concessions wrung from the Venezuelan dictator by threats of a revolution, partly by trade, partly by pillage. But he would explain that through it all he had kept the great purpose in view—to found a great family, to breed a great foal from a great dam; and they whom he had robbed were small crawling men without a purpose. And then he would ask her to go with him to the racing motor in the boulevard, ride to the government offices and be married to him. ”

“ Indeed, I have often thought if our first emperor, Han, eight thousand years ago, could have foreseen that his people, the Children of Heaven, would preserve themselves for eight millenniums in order to have the honor of forming a nexus between the black cannibals then gorging themselves on each other's flesh along the Congo and white sea-robbers, fighting and murdering, ravishing and tippling along the Baltic, I have often thought how gratified our first emperor would have been! ”

“ Now, here this damned Jerry Weck has bobbed up out of the Orinoco in the clubs of Trinidad, and he's disarranged my whole plans——'
"He stood frowning slightly, with the annoyed look of a man who has been stopped by a tire-puncture.
"'May I ask what were your plans, señor?' I ventured curiously.
"'Certainly,' he said bruskly. There is nothing in my life that I have any need to conceal. I wanted to marry an English girl, a fine-blooded English girl.' He turned and motioned a fist at me with an expository gesture. 'You see, Wong Loo, sudden wealth comes to a man with a question. ”

“ This heart of mine would beat through centuries'—he struck his chest—'changed, perhaps, but brave and strong and ruthless—I should live!'
"'Why, yes,' defined Miss Kelvey, with frank admiration in her blue eyes; 'that's eugenics. I majored in that.'
"'And I hate death, Señorita! Mio Dios! To be struggling one minute in the water, beating, shrieking, and the next moment a limp sack of hide yourself! Ugh! And yet it is an end every man reaches somehow or another, señorita, unless he finds immortality in brave sons. ”

“ Chum Wong's almond eyes wrinkled with a faint interrogative smile.
"Well, everybody in Port au Spain knew of the ball. The town is as intimate as a village. The boulevard was full of the motors of wealthy Chinese and Persians and Syrians and Hindus, yellow folk of position who had not been invited; and every one saw them getting away almost surreptitiously.
"The Magnificent Pompalone, however, did not lose his face so easily as his guests. Straight in the teeth of that swarming boulevard, he kept the lights in his villa burning till two o'clock that night. ”

“ Through it all he preserved the faint satire of his Chinese superiority to the juvenilities of our Western civilization. We were all moonstruck, he said; the Western world suffered from the megalomania of youth. And then he instanced Pompalone. ”

“ He sent for me because he knew that we Chinese are the most nearly respectable folk of all the races in Trinidad wearing the livery of the Sun. We are, you might say, the 'demis.' We tread a delicate path. Some of us marry white persons, some colored. ”

“ The Magnificent Pompalone
Is the Western World Suffering from the Megalomania of Youth? Sounds Deadly, but It Isn't. Only the Subject is Serious—Not the Treatment
By T. S. Stribling
CHUM WONG LOO, a copra exporter in Tragarette Road down near the Carnage, told me this story one moonlit night on the savanna in Port au Spain. We were looking at an Italian villa built of Barbados chalk. It arose white, unbelievably white, in the moonlit, and was fronted by an overture of terraced gardens and an arpeggio of palms. ”