The cast was clustered at the mike. They watched the control-room. Wylie’s hand was in the air. It descended in an arc, and a finger pointed at Stella.
The girl began to read. The finger hovered and pointed at Joe. The finger went back to Stella again. So Vic Wylie timed and paced his shows.
Stella’s hand was gone, but her encouraging smile flashed to Joe with every cue. His tongue loosened, and the cords of his throat were free. All at once he was rid of the ghosts of sponsor trouble and the chill of the silent listeners in the chairs. They no longer existed. Nothing existed but the script.
And then there was no longer a script. The script was life—the life of Dick Davis and his mother. This, then, was what Wylie’s plea to “live it” meant. The cast fused, blended, and became like a mighty, moving chord from an organ. Time ceased to be studio time; time was time in the life of the Davis family. They were playing the tenth script. Joe poured words that should have been old by now, but which to-day were new, into the microphone:
Dick: Mother, don’t shake your head at me like that. You must listen—
Stella Joyce spoke the curtain line of the script. There was a brooding hush, as though the world was held in a spell.
Wylie’s voice, hoarse with feeling, broke the stillness. “Thank you. That’s from my heart.”
The studio echoed with the confusion of an audience breaking up. Chairs scraped, people gathered in groups, voices made a blurred buzz of sound.
Stella said: “The woman with Munson is his wife.”
Wylie appeared to be in violent argument with somebody in the control-room. But then, Joe thought, Wylie was always having a violent moment about something.