The camera man began to show interest: he was a skilled mechanician and he caught the drift of a sensible purpose, at last.
Shirley did not answer. He placed the first record in the phonograph, running it until the feminine voice could be distinguished asking: “Can you hear me now?” He marked the beginning and end of this phrase with his pocket knife. So with the merry masculine and the aged, disagreeable voice, he located the same order of words: “Can you hear me now?” The operation seems easy, in the telling, or again perhaps it appears intensely involved and hardly worth the trouble. A motto of Shirley's was: “Nothing is too much trouble if it's worth while.” So, with this. To the cynical camera man its general nature was expressed in his whispered phrase to the manager:
“You better not leave them property butcher knives on that there table, Mr. Harrison. This gink is nuts: he thinks's he's Mike Angelo or some other sculpture. He'll start sculpin' the crowd in a minute!”
“You take the picture and keep your opinions to yourself,” snapped Shirley whose hearing was highly trained.
The man lapsed into silence. For two hours they fumed and perspired and swore, under the intense heat of the low-hung mercury lamps, until at last a test proved they had the right combination. Shirley greased the skill of the camera man with a well-directed gratuity, and ordered speedy development of the film. Before this was done, however, he took six other records of voices from the folk in the studio, using the same words: “Can you hear me now?”
The three strips of triple exposures were taken to the dark room and developed by the camera man. They were dried on the revolving electric drums, near a battery of fans. Shirley studied every step of the work, with this and that question—this had been his method of acquiring a curiously catholic knowledge of scientific methods since leaving the university, where sporting proclivities had prompted him to slide through courses with as little toil as possible.
A print upon “positive” film was made from each: every strip was duplicated twenty-five times, at Shirley's suggestion. Then after two hours of effort the material was ready to be run through the projecting machine, for viewing upon the screen.
The manager led Shirley to the small exhibition theatre in which every film was studied, changed and cut from twenty to fifty times before being released for the theatres. The camera man went into the little fire-proof booth, to operate the machine.
“Which one first, chief?”
“Take one by chance,” said Shirley, “and I will guess its number. Start away.”