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."