Читать книгу Seibert of the Island онлайн

2 страница из 85

McGuire came to know Seibert of Pulotu better than he was known by anyone else. McGuire did not like Germans—"Dutchmen" he called them.

Though this enigmatic German and his affairs were almost forgotten years ago by even the island planters with the longest memories, McGuire remembers Seibert as a sort of prophetic figure whose grotesqueness of character—the mingling of sentimentality, brutality, odd simplicity, and indomitable bull-headness—somewhat typified the nation that in recent times brought disaster upon itself, upon nearly the whole world.

Any one of many incidents, widely scattered as to time and place, might have been taken as the beginning; but McGuire chose a San Francisco dance hall riot out of which he and the young stranger with whom he had been talking escaped before the police got there. Soon they came to a chowder house and went in.

The young fellow was a newcomer to San Francisco. He said that his name was Paullen—John Paullen. McGuire had liked him at sight. He was thin, straight, slight, with square shoulders, rather pale, unduly sober for one of his years, and grey eyed. His eyes were a little too much as a girl's ought to be, with lashes so long as to be the only lashes McGuire ever before noticed on a man's face. He was the sort of boy that women love almost instinctively.