Chapter XVII A Daily Unpleasantness
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.”
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.
I replied, “I am going home from my work, sir.”
“Y-your w-what?” he growled.
“My work, sir, at the theatre.”
“Good Lord!” he groaned, “and t-that crawlin’ r-reptile couldn’t let you pass, you poor little soul, you!”
Upon my word, I thought he was going to weep over me. Next moment he turned his collar up with a violence that nearly upset him, and exclaimed: “D-don’t you be a-fraid. I’ll see you safely home. G-go by yourself? not much you won’t! I’ll take you to your mother. S-say, you’ve got a mother, haven’t you? Yes, that’s right; every girl’s worth anythin’s got a mother. I-I’ll take you to her, sure; receive maternal thanks, a-and all that. Oh, say, boys! look here!” he shouted, and holding out the big cane in front of me to prevent my passing, he called to him two other men, who slowly and with almost superhuman caution were negotiating the snowy steps.
“Say, Colonel! Judge! come here and help me p-pr’tect this un-fortunate child.” The Judge at that moment sat heavily and unintentionally down on the bottom step, and the Colonel remarked pleasantly, though a trifle vaguely, “T-that’s the time he hit it”; while the fallen man asked calmly from his snowy seat, “P-pr-protect what—f-from who?”
“This poor ch-i-ld from raging beasts and in-famous scoundrels, Judge,” remarked my bombastic friend.
“We’re gentlemen, my dear; and say, get the Judge up, Colonel, and start him, and we’ll all see her safe home. Damn shame, a la-dy can’t walk in safety, w-without ’er body of able-bodied cit-zens to protect her! Com’er long, now, child.” And he grasped my arm and pushed me gently forward.
The Colonel tipped his hat over one eye, gave a military salute, and wavered back and forth. The Judge muttered something about “Honest woman against city of New York,” and something “and costs,” and both fell to the rear.
And thus escorted by all these intoxicated old gallants, I made my mortified way up the avenue, they wobbling and sliding and stammering, and he who held my arm, I distinctly remember, recited Byron to me, and told me many times that the Judge was “a p-perfect gentleman, and so was his wife.”
This startling statement was delivered just as we reached Thirty-second Street. Like an eel I slipped from his grasp, and whirling about, I said as rapidly as I could speak, “I’m almost home now. I can see the light from here, and I can’t take you any farther out of your way,” and I darted down the darker street.
Looking back from my own stoop, I saw the three kindly old sinners making salutations at the corner. My bombastic friend and the Judge had their hats off, waving them, and the Colonel saluted with such rigid propriety, it seems a pity that he was facing the wrong way.
I laugh, oh, yes, I laugh at the memory, until I think how silvery were these three wine-muddled old heads, and then I feel “the pity, oh, the pity of it!”