If you are fortunate
enough to set the whole table laughing, one of this class of persons will
look inquiringly round, as if something had happened, and, seeing
everybody apparently amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed
at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to
hear. Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is
nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people's
laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known
color-blindness with which many persons are afflicted as a congenital
incapacity.
I have never seen the Scarabee smile. I have seen him take off his
goggles,--he breakfasts in these occasionally,--I suppose when he has
been tiring his poor old eyes out over night gazing through his
microscope,--I have seen him take his goggles off, I say, and stare about
him, when the rest of us were laughing at something which amused us, but
his features betrayed nothing more than a certain bewilderment, as if we
had been foreigners talking in an unknown tongue. I do not think it was
a mere fancy of mine that he bears a kind of resemblance to the tribe of
insects he gives his life to studying. His shiny black coat; his rounded
back, convex with years of stooping over his minute work; his angular
movements, made natural to him by his habitual style of manipulation; the
aridity of his organism, with which his voice is in perfect keeping;--all
these marks of his special sedentary occupation are so nearly what might
be expected, and indeed so much, in accordance with the more general fact
that a man's aspect is subdued to the look of what he works in, that I do
not feel disposed to accuse myself of exaggeration in my account of the
Scarabee's appearance.
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