Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/314

 kindly flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmilitaristic America to which he had emigrated in protest against Junkerdom.

Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Germans were baby-killers, universities barring the language of Heine, orchestras outlawing the music of Beethoven, professors in uniform bellowing at clerks, and the clerks never protesting.

It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love for America or to his egotism, that he should have guessed so grotesquely; it is curious that he who had so denounced the machine-made education of the land should yet have been surprised when it turned blithely to the old, old, mechanical mockeries of war.

When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himself regarded not as the great and impersonal immunologist but as a suspect German Jew.

True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look upon him dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect and stiff when they passed in the corridor. When Gottlieb insisted to Tubbs at lunch, "I am villing to admit every virtue of the French—I am very fond of that so individual people—but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that there must be some good Germans out of sixty millions," then Col. Dr. Tubbs commanded, "In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!"

In shops and on the elevated trains, little red-faced sweaty people when they heard his accent glared at him, and growled one to another, "There's one of them damn' barb'rous well-poisoning Huns!" and however contemptuous he might be, however much he strove for ignoring pride, their nibbling reduced him from arrogant scientist to an insecure, raw-nerved, shrinking old man.

And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to know him, a hostess whose maiden name was Straufnabel and who had married into the famous old Anglican family of Rosemont, when Gottlieb bade her "Auf Wiedersehen" cried out upon him, "Dr. Gottlieb, I'm very sorry, but the use of that disgusting language is not permitted in this house!"

He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac and the Hunziker factory; he had begun to expand, to entertain people—scientists, musicians, talkers. Now he was thrust