Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [157]
In shops and on the elevated train, 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 back into himself. With Terry gone, he trusted only Miriam and Martin and Ross McGurk; and his deep-set wrinkle-lidded eyes looked ever on sadness.
But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought to have in the window of her house a Service Flag with a star for every person at the Institute who had put on uniform.
She took it quite seriously, and did it.
VIII
The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs’s luncheon lectures on “the part America will inevitably play in the reconstruction of a Democratic Europe.”
They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio–Physics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six months before had been singing Studentenlieder at Luchow’s, was working on poison gas to be used against all singers of Lieder; and to Martin was assigned the manufacture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely ground typhoid and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job, and dull. Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily welcomed scientific papers in which lipovaccines were condemned as inferior to ordinary salt solutions.
He was conscious of Gottlieb’s sorrowing and tried to comfort him.
It was Martin’s most pitiful fault that he was not very kind to shy people and lonely people and stupid old people; he was not cruel to them, he simply was unconscious of them or so impatient of their fumbling that he avoided them. Whenever Leora taxed him with it he grumbled:
“Well, but — I’m too much absorbed in my work, or in doping stuff out, to waste time on morons. And it’s a good thing. Most people above the grade of hog do so much chasing around after a lot of vague philanthropy that they never get anything done — and most of your confounded shy people get spiritually pauperized. Oh, it’s so much easier to be good-natured and purring and self-congratulatory and generally footless than it is to pound ahead and keep yourself strictly for your own work, the work that gets somewhere. Very few people have the courage to be decently selfish — not answer letters — and demand the right to work. If they had their way, these sentimentalists would’ve had a Newton — yes, or probably a Christ!— giving up everything they did for the world to address meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old maids. Nothing takes so much courage as to keep hard and clear-headed.”
And he hadn’t even that courage.
When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind to all sorts of alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then drift back into his absorption. There were but two people whose unhappiness could always pierce him: Leora and Gottlieb.
Though he was busier than he had known anyone could ever be, with lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the evening and, at all sorts of intense hours between, the continuation of his staphylolysin research, he gave what time he could to seeking out Gottlieb and warming his vanity by reverent listening.