Mankind in the
bulk is very young; it is very easily amused and, like a child, clamours
for the oft-repeated tale.
The curtain went down on the last turn before Lola's. I felt a curious
suspense, and half wished that I had not come to see the performance.
I shrank from finding her a million miles away from me, a new, remote
creature, impersonal as those who had already appeared on the stage.
Mingled with this was a fear lest she might not please this vast
audience. Failure, I felt, would be as humiliating to me as to her.
Agatha, I remembered, confessed to the same feeling with regard to
myself when I made my first speech in the House of Commons. But then
I had an incontrovertible array of facts and arguments, drawn up by an
infallible secretary and welded into cunning verbiage by myself, which
I learned off by heart. And the House, as I knew it would, had been
half asleep. I couldn't fail. But Lola had to please three thousand
wide-awake Berlin citizens, who had paid their money for entertainment,
with no other equipment than her own personality and the tricks of a set
of wretched irresponsible cats.
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