"O gleaming lamps of London, that gem the City's crown,
What fortunes lie within you, O lights of London Town!"—
G. R. Sims, Ballads of Babylon.
As I was travelling, one day in winter, by the familiar and homely 'bus whose "hue is green and gold"; not however, the "St. John's Wood" 'bus, but that humbler and more business-like one which runs between Victoria and King's Cross, I observed, as we ascended Long Acre, a young woman get in at Bow Street, followed by a "lady friend" at Drury Lane. They were hot, untidy, and, as to their attire, muddy, be-bugled, and be-plushed; also, one of them carried a large and equally be-bugled baby. After their first salutations, they panted for a few minutes, out of breath; then:—
"I've got it, duckie," cried the Bow Street charmer, a young woman with a big black fringe, and the owner of the overdressed and pasty-faced baby.
"What have you got, dearie?" inquired her friend, who wore a dirty blouse that had once been yellow, under a heavy plush fur-trimmed cape (the month was November). The 'bus sat expectant.
"'E's made me a thief!" (The 'bus, to a man, or rather, woman, started.) "I told 'im as I'd give 'im no peace till 'e did; I was bound to go back an' back, till 'e give me somethin'. An' now, sweetie, I'm one er the forty thieves, at a quid a week, and find nothin'. Ain't that somethin'?"
A light broke in upon the wondering 'bus, and all the auditors peacefully resumed their papers or their reflections. Of course, it was the Drury Lane pantomime! It was stupid of us not to have guessed it before, for the "dearie," "duckie" and "sweetie" ought to have suggested it at once! Also, the dresses of the two interlocutors, which, now that I looked at them again, seemed to have on the beholder that peculiar effect of combined smartness and disorder that, for some reason or the other, distinguishes the "pro;" the "pro,"—that is,—of the lower ranks of the theatrical profession.
The profession (as it is expressively and somewhat exclusively called by its devotees) embraces, of course, as many "sorts and conditions of men" as the equally large profession of newspaper writers. While it still remains a cruel fact that any one picked up "drunk and incapable" in a London street is usually described in next day's Police News as either a journalist or an actress, there can yet be no doubt that the Bohemianism of the past, so far as the higher class of the theatrical world is concerned, is going out of fashion. With few exceptions, it is only among the lower ranks of "pros," or in music-halls, that it largely exists. These exceptions are, usually, to be found among those who have suddenly risen from obscurity on the theatrical firmament, to shine as bright "stars" for some brief period. Nowhere is success so sudden, so overwhelming, so blinding as it is in this vast city of London; and nowhere, alas! is that success so soon over, forgotten, eclipsed. The deity of one season is forsaken in the next; the Ruler-of-the-Universe must perforce return to his hovel, and, to say truth, he generally takes the change badly. London has a short memory. But the medal has its pleasanter reverse side. For, per contra, the young woman who has for years, maybe, blushed unseen in Camberwell, wasted her sweetness on seaside "fit-ups," and lorded it in third-rate provincial companies, may, suddenly, by some unexpected turn of Fortune's wheel, find herself elevated to the highest salaries in the profession. From a penurious lodging in the slums,—a daily "third return" from Gower Street,—she may rise, almost in the twinkling of an eye, to £40 a week, a flat in Mayfair, and a daintily-clipped poodle!
It is, of course, the fame of such sudden successes that suffices to "turn the heads" of ignorant neophytes, who are but too apt to forget the common maxim, that "the many fail, the one succeeds." Thus it is that the stage has been for years flooded with girls of all classes, all eager for distinction, and all, alas! desiring "the palm without the dust!" Rising actresses have, as a rule, but one ambition—to act in London, to charm London audiences. Better, some think, a three-line part at the Lyceum than a "juvenile lead" at Leamington; better twenty weeks of the Criterion than a cycle of the Counties; better a curtain-raiser in the Haymarket than Shakespeare's Rosalind at Darlington or Preston. Hence the cruel and heart-rending "struggle-for-life" among young actresses in this big city of London; hence the weeks of slow starvation in Bloomsbury lodgings or Soho garrets, waiting for work that never comes. It is, indeed, for them, the "dust without the palm." Disappointed hopes, shattered ambitions, tragic suicides,—what stories could some of those Bloomsbury garrets tell!
"O cruel lamps of London, if tears your light could drown,
Your victims' eyes would weep them, O lights of London Town."
Theatrical managers are callous; they can, indeed, hardly be otherwise, for the stage, like journalism, is scarcely "a charitable institution"; and the supply of stage applicants is far greater than the demand. When a new play is to be produced at a theatre, see how its waiting-rooms and grimy staircases are daily crowded with young men and women, all eager, all well-dressed, and all anxiously trying to conceal their often desperate need of money. For they must always be well-dressed; no self-respecting manager will ever think twice of a shabby or dowdy young woman; and dress is difficult to procure on a starvation diet.