What is the most unpleasant experience in the daily life of a young
actress?
Without pause for thought, and most emphatically too, I answer, her
passing unattended through the city streets at night; that is made
unalloyed misery, through terror and humiliation. The backwoods girl
makes her lonely way through the forest by blazed trees, but the way of
the lonely girl through the city streets is marked by blazing blushes.
It is an infamy that a girl's honesty should not protect her by night as
well as by day. Those hideous hyenas of the midnight streets are never
deceived. By one glance they can distinguish between a good woman and
those poor wandering ghosts of dead modesty and honour, who flit
restlessly back and forth from alleys dark to bright gas glare; but
bring one of these men to book, and he will declare that "decent women
have no right to be in the streets after nightfall," as though citizens
were to maintain public highways for the sole use one-half the time of
all the evil things that hide from light to creep out at dark and meet
those companions who are fair by day and foul by night.
Some girls never learn to face the homeward walk with steady nerves,
others grow used to the swift approach, the rapidly spoken word, and
receive them with set, stony face and deaf ears; but oh, the terror and
the shame of it at first! And this horror of the night takes so many
forms that it is hard to say which one is the most revolting--hard to
decide between the vile innuendo whispered by a sober brute or the
roared ribaldry of a drunken beast.
In one respect I differ from most of my companions in misery, since
they almost invariably fear most the drunkard; while I ground my greater
fear of the sober man upon the simple fact that I can't outrun him as I
can a drunken one, at a pinch. One night, in returning home from a
performance of "Divorce,"--a very long play that brought me into the
street extra late,--a shrieking man flew across my path, and as a second
rushed after him with knife uplifted for a killing blow, his foot caught
in mine, and as he pitched forward the knife sank into his victim's arm
instead of his back as he had intended; and with the cries of "Murder!
Police!" ringing in my ears, I ran as if I were the murderess. These
things are in themselves a pretty high price to pay for being an
actress.
I had a friend, an ancient lady, a relative of one of our greatest
actors, who, for independence' sake, taught music in her old age. One
night she had played at a concert and was returning home. Tall and
slight and heavily veiled, she walked alone. Then suddenly appeared a
well-looking young son of Belial, undoubtedly a gentleman by daylight.
He tipped his hat and twirled his mustache; she turned away her head. He
cleared his throat; she seemed quite deaf. He spoke; he called her
"girlie" (the scamp!). She walked the faster; so did he. He protested
she should not walk home alone; she stopped; she spoke, "Will you please
allow me to walk home in peace?"
But, no, that was just what he would not do, and suddenly she answered,
"Very well, then, I accept your escort, though under protest."
[Illustration: _Clara Morris in "Evadne"_]
Surprised, he walked at her side. The way was long, the silence grew
painful. He ventured to suggest supper as they passed a restaurant; she
gently declined. At last she stopped directly beneath a gas-lamp, and
from her face, with sorrow-hollowed eyes and temples, where everyone of
her seventy-six years had been stamped in cruel line and crease and
wrinkle, she lifted up the veil and raised her sad old eyes
reproachfully to his. He staggered back, turned red, turned white,
stammered, took off his hat, attempted to apologize, then turned and
fled.
"And what," I asked, "did you say to him?"
"Say, say," she repeated; "justice need not be cruel. Why add anything
to the sight of this?" and she drew a finger down her withered cheek.
'Twas said with laughing bitterness, for she had been very fair, and
well guarded, too, in the distant past; while then I could but catch her
tired hands and kiss them, in a burst of pity that this ancient
gentlewoman might not walk in peace through the city streets because
fate had left her without a protector.
Appeal to the police, I think some one says. Of course, if he is about;
but recall that famous old recipe of Mrs. Glass beginning, "First catch
your hare and then--" so, just catch your policeman. But believe me,
they rarely appear together,--your tormentor of women and your
policeman,--unless, indeed, the former is stupidly in liquor; and then
what good if he is arrested? shame will prevent you from appearing
against him. Silence and speed, therefore, are generally the best
defensive weapons of the frightened, lonely girl.
Once through fright, fatigue, and shame I lost all self-control, and
turning to the creature whom I could not outwalk, I cried out with a
sob, "Oh, I am so tired, so frightened, and so ashamed; you make me wish
that I were dead!" And to my amazement, he answered gruffly, "It's a
pity _I'm_ not," and disappeared in the dark side street.
After an actress has married and has a protector to see her safely home
nights, she is apt to recall and to tell amusing stories of her past
experiences; but I notice those tales are never told by the girls--they
only become funny when looked at from the point of perfect safety,
though like everything else in the world, the dreaded midnight walk
shows a touch of the ludicrous now and then.
I recall one snowy January night when I was returning home. It was on a
Saturday, and I had played a five-act play twice with but a sandwich for
my dinner, the weather forbidding my going home after the matinee. So
being without change to ride with, hungry and unutterably weary, I
started, bag in hand, to walk up Sixth Avenue. On the east side stood a
certain club house (it stands there yet, by the way), whose peculiar
feature was a vine-hung veranda across its entire front, from which an
unusually long flight of steps led to the sidewalk. Quite unmolested, I
had walked from the stage door almost to this building, when suddenly,
as if he had sprung from the very earth, a man was at my elbow
addressing me, and the fact that he was not English, and so not
understood, did not in the slightest degree lessen the terror his evil
face inspired. I shrank away from him, and he caught at my wrist. It was
too much. I gave a cry and started to run, when, tall and broad, a man
appeared at the foot of the club-house steps, just ahead of me. Ashamed
to be seen running, I halted, and dropped into a walk again.
Then with that exaggerated straightening of back and stiffening of knee
adopted by one who tries to walk a floor-crack or chalk-line, the second
man approached me. He was very big, he was silvery grey, and his dignity
was portentous. At every step he struck the pavement a ringing blow with
a splendid malacca cane. Old-fashioned and gold-headed, it looked enough
like its owner to have been his twin brother. He lifted his high silk
hat, and with somewhat florid indignation inquired: "My c-hild, was that
in-nfamous cur annoying you shust now? A-a-h!" he broke off,
flourishing his cane over his head, "there y-you slink; I w-wish I had
hold of you." And I heard the running footsteps of No. 1 as he darted
away, across and down the avenue.
"An-and the police?" sarcastically resumed the big man, who wavered
unsteadily now and then. "H-how useful are the police! How many do y-you
see at this moment, pray, eh? And, by the way, m' child, what in the
devil's name brings yer on the street alone at this hour, say, tell me
that?" and he assumed a most judicial attitude and manner.