“It is the isolation,” said Stokharin, nodding. Dandruff fell lightly like dry snow from his thick brows to his dark blue lapels. “The camera separates him from everyone else. He is projected like a dream into....” “He was so afraid at first,” said Iris, glancing across the room at the silent Cave who sat, very small and still in the brocaded chair, the teacup still balanced on one knee. “I’ve never seen him disturbed by anything before. They tried to get him to do a rehearsal but he refused. He can’t do rehearsals ... only the actual thing.” “Fear is natural when ...” but Stokharin was in the presence of a master drawing-room tactician: Iris was, I saw at that moment, a born hostess. For all her ease and simplicity she was ruthlessly concerned with keeping order, establishing a rightness of tone which Doctor Stokharin, in his professional madness, would have completely undone, reducing the drawing room to a seminar in mental therapy, receiving public confessions judiciously, and generalizing to a captive audience. I admired Iris’s firmness, her devotion to the civilized. “At first we hardly knew what to do.” Iris’s voice rose serenely over the East European rumblings of the doctor. “He’d always made such a point of the audience. He needed actual people to excite him. Paul wanted to fill the studio with a friendly audience but John said no. He’d try it without. When the talk began there were only a half dozen of us there: Paul, myself, and the technicians. No one else.” “How did he manage?” “It was the camera. He said when he walked out there he had no idea if anything would happen or not, if he could speak. Paul was nearly out of his mind with terror; we all were. Then John saw the lens of the camera. He said looking into it gave him a sudden shock, like a current of electricity passing through him, for there, in front of him, was the eye of the world and the microphone above his head was the ear into which at last he could speak. When he finished, he was transfigured. I’ve never seen him so excited. He couldn’t recall what he had said but the elation remained until....” “Until he got here.” “Well, nearly.” Iris smiled. “He’s been under a terrible strain these last two weeks.”