It was only an occasional horrified Christian or exasperated Socialist who ever diverted him, and then he would descend to embittering personalities with disconcerting quickness. He was of French descent, Gascon, a tall, fair, pale man, and had the racial instinct for combat. In the daytime he was the Wall Street reporter for one of the evening dailies, and people who knew him down there said he went about his work in that district like a pious pilgrim in Judea. But what you did daytimes never mattered at Isham’s. It was what you could say evenings after dinner, in the back of the dining-room beside the bar, that counted, and there Savelle, next to Twinkle, was the best listened-to man in Isham’s.
And, measured by that scale, little Norvel was his farthest neighbor. He was the least listened-to man, because he rarely spoke, and the best listener. Indeed, he was the only genuine listener. The others listened only under force majeure. He, on the contrary, would dine sparely, for he was very poor, apparently, and sit smoking all evening until ten o’clock, and go away without ever speaking to any one, except the waiter who served, and a “Good evening” and “Good night” to Mr. Isham himself. His prestige was due solely to one effort. He had propounded a query which Isham’s had discussed more than any other ever raised there, more than Twinkle’s lunar hypotheses, or Savelle’s Christian economics, and which had never been settled. It was the one common topic among them. Other subjects owed their existence and prosperity to the protection and loyalty of one man, but little Norvel, having put his afoot, retired into silence and cigar smoke, and left its life to the care of others. He had injected the conundrum into a conversation of Twinkle Sampson’s about the inhabitants of Mars, in whose existence Twinkle Sampson not only believed, but took a far deeper interest than in those of his fellow earthmen.
“If,” little Norvel began, “if Mars is inhabited by a race so similar to ourselves—if—”
“Well, well, Mr. Norvel,” Twinkle Sampson interrupted, “that is fairly well conceded, I think. If—what?”
“If,” continued little Norvel tranquilly, “if it is so, what means of communication between us is there that is so unmistakably of human origin that a sight of it, or a sound from it, would immediately convince them of our relationship?”
It had seemed, when the quiet little man first spoke, as if it was a question easily brushed aside; but a little discussion, genuine Ishamic, soon proved it to have greater weight. Norvel sat aside, contributing nothing then or ever thereafter. Indeed, the only result the question had, or seemed to have, for him was the winning by it of the deep affection of Twinkle Sampson.
The early discussion of the matter eliminated all possibilities of the sense of hearing. That one of the five senses had to be discarded from the possibilities of communication. There is no sound which humanity can create which nature, in some other form, cannot perfectly imitate. Except laughter? That suggestion was Savelle’s. But it was not successful, though he defended himself with his own peculiar fervor. It appealed to the intense emotionalism of the man, that idea of the ultimate expression of humanity being laughter. He took up its defense as recklessly as his school of economics, and with something of the same breadth of vision and indefinite reasoning. Laughter was, he claimed, beyond the narrow limits of the question discussed, that very thing, the ultimate expression of humanity. Man was distinctively not, as he has been defined, the unfeathered biped, not the tool-using animal; he was the animal who laughs, and in proof he instanced the great poet. When he wished to imbue men with his own immense pessimism that the wrath of the Zeus was not the mysterious working of nature but the malignity of men, he made that terrible phrase, the most terrible ever spoken, “The laughter of the gods.”
“Think of it yourselves,” he demanded. “Put it into your own words. The laughter of God!” He was standing up then in the heat of his pleading. “What that’s divine is left then? He can only be a man, a fearful superman.”
But they beat down the orator with instances of gurgling brooks and hyenas. He strove Homerically with his attackers, thundering his defense of his vision until old Isham had to come up to the table and look at them all with his faded blue eyes and precocious face of seventy years. But though he failed of conviction his argument did just what he said; it put the question outside the “narrow limits” Norvel had laid it in. Savelle always did that with every question. After he had spoken the phrase they all remembered was his—the ultimate expression of humanity. It was by such phrases, such ideas, Isham’s lived, as a place to which talk-hungry people learned to go.
Old Sampson, who always listened to Savelle, though he deplored his tendency “to wander in his talk,” away from the moon and kindred subjects, took a new lease of life from that night. At last a day had come when people really liked to talk about the moon, or Mars, which was almost as good. He became a mental manufacturer of objects of origin so exclusively human that once they were conveyed to Mars, once that difficulty overcome, would produce instant understanding. Almost nightly he would turn up with a new one, and invariably some one would overthrow his hopes by suggesting a natural, in distinction to his human, phenomenon. He would always feebly defend his invention, and then fall silent—apparently intent upon a new one.