Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [156]
Yeo had put on Major’s uniform, but he never felt neighborly with it. (He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr. Tubbs had told him he was, and he knew that this was a Major’s uniform because the clothing salesman said so.) He walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy, deprecatory way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots; and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.
But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely explained to Martin, as they were marching to the completely militarized dining-hall:
“Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this saluting? Darn it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean. One time I took a Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a Portygee. But I’ve got the idea now!” Yeo laid his finger beside his large nose, and produced wisdom: “Whenever I see any fellow in uniform that looks older than I am, I salute him — my nephew, Ted, has drilled me so I salute swell now — and if he don’t salute back, well, Lord, I just think about my work and don’t fuss. If you look at it scientifically, this military life isn’t so awful’ hard after all!”
VII
Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, had set its face against the puerile pride of war. He believed that he had ceased to be a German, now, and become a countryman of Lincoln.
The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge from Winnemac, which had ever broken his sardonic serenity. In the war he could see no splendor nor hope, but only crawling tragedy. He treasured his months of work and good talk in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French and English and Italian friends as he loved his ancient Korpsbruder, and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with whom he had drudged and drunk.
His sister’s sons — on home-craving vacations he had seen them, in babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood — went out with the Kaiser’s colors in 1914; one of them became an Oberst, much decorated, one existed insignificantly, and one was dead and stinking in ten days. This he sadly endured, as later he endured his son Robert’s going out as an American lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this man to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than 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