Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections

If this simple tale is to be told at all, it may as well begin at the beginning and in the good old-fashioned and best of all ways--thus: Once upon a time in the Canadian city of Toronto, on the 17th of March, the sun rose bright and clear--which was a most surprising thing for the sun to do on St. Patrick's Day, but while the people were yet wondering over it the sunlight disappeared, clouds of dull gray spread themselves evenly over the sky, and then the snow fell--fell fast and furious, quickly whitening the streets and house-tops, softly lining every hollow, and was piling little cushions on top of all the hitching-posts, when the flakes grew larger, wetter, farther apart, and after a little hesitation turned to rain--a sort of walk-trot-gallop rain, which wound up with one vivid flash of lightning and a clap of thunder that fairly shook the city.

Now the Irish, being a brave people and semi-amphibious, pay no heed to wet weather. Usually all the Hibernians residing in a city divide themselves into two bodies on St. Patrick's Day, the ones who parade and the ones who follow the parade; but on this occasion they divided themselves into three bodies--the men who paraded, the men and women who followed the parade, and the Orangemen who made things pleasant for both parties.

As the out-of-time, out-of-tune band turned into a quiet cross-street to lead its following green-bannered host to a broader one, the first brick was thrown--probably by a woman, as it hit no one, but metaphorically it knocked the chip off of the shoulder of every child of Erin. Down fell the banners, up went the fists! Orange and Green were at each other tooth and nail! Hats from prehistoric ages side by side with modern beavers scarcely fifty years old received the hurled brick-bat and went down together!

The band reached the broad avenue alone, and looked back to see the short street a-sway with struggling men, while women holding their bedraggled petticoats up, their bonnets hanging down their backs by green ribbon ties, hovered about the edges of the crowd, making predatory dashes now and then to scratch a face or rescue some precious hat from the mêlée, meanwhile inciting the men to madness by their fierce cries--and in a quiet house, in the very midst of this riot--just before the constabulary charged the crowd--I was born. I don't know, of course, whether I was really intended from the first for that house, or whether the stork became so frightened at the row in the street that he just dropped me from sheer inability to carry me any farther--anyway, I came to a house where trouble and poverty had preceded me, and, worse than both these put together--treachery.

Still, I accepted the situation with indifference. That the cupboard barely escaped absolute emptiness gave me no anxiety, as I had no teeth anyway. As a gentleman with a medicine-case in his hand was leaving the house he paused a moment for the slavey to finish washing away a pool of blood from the bottom step--and then there came that startling clap of thunder. Brand new as I was to this world and its ways, I entered my protest at once with such force and evident wrath that the doctor down-stairs exclaimed: "Our young lady has temper as well as a good pair of lungs!" and went on his way laughing.

And so on that St. Patrick's Day of sunshine, snow, and rain, of riot and bloodshed, in trouble and poverty--I was born.

Beginning Early, I Learn Love, Fear, and Hunger--I Become Acquainted with Letters, and Alas! I Lose One of my Two Illusions.

Of the Days of St. Patrick that followed, not one found me in the city of my birth--indeed, six months completed my period of existence in the Dominion, and I have known it no more.

Some may think it strange that I mention these early years at all, but the reason for such mention will appear later on. Looking back at them, they seem to divide themselves into groups of four years each. During the first four, my time was principally spent in growing and learning to keep out of people's way. I acquired some other knowledge, too, and little child as I was, I knew fear long before I knew the thing that frightened me. I knew that love for my mother which was to become the passion of my life, and I also knew hunger. But the fear was harder to endure than the hunger--it was so vague, yet so all-encompassing.

We had to flit so often--suddenly, noiselessly. Often I was gently roused from my sleep at night and hastily dressed--sometimes simply wrapped up without being dressed, and carried through the dark to some other place of refuge, from--what? When I went out into the main business streets I had a tormenting barège veil over my face that would not let me see half the pretty things in the shop windows, and I was quick to notice that no other little girl had a veil on. Next I remarked that if a strange lady spoke to me my mother seemed pleased--but if a man noticed me she was not pleased, and once when a big man took me by the hand and led me to a candy store for some candy she was as white as could be and so angry she frightened me, and she promised me a severe punishment if I ever, ever went one step with a strange man again. And so my fear began to take the form of a man, of a big, smiling man--for my mother always asked, when I reported that a stranger had spoken to me, if he was big and smiling.

I had known the sensation of hunger long before I knew the word that expressed it, and I often pressed my hands over my small empty stomach, and cried and pulled at my mother's dress skirt. If there was anything at all to give I received it, but sometimes there was absolutely nothing but a drink of water to offer, which checked the gnawing for a moment or two, and at those times there was a tightening of my mother's trembling lips, and a straight up and down wrinkle between her brows, that I grew to know, and when I saw that look on her face I could not ask for anything more than "a dwink, please."

As an illustration of her almost savage pride and honesty: I one day saw a woman in front of the house buying some potatoes. I knew that potatoes cooked were very comforting to empty stomachs. One or two of them fell to the street during the measuring and I picked one up, and, fairly wild with delight, I scrambled up the stairs with it. But my mother was angry through and through.

"Who gave it to you?" she demanded.

I explained with a trembling voice: "I des' founded it on the very ground--and I'se so hungry!"

But hungry or not hungry, I had to take the potato back: "Nothing in the world could be taken without asking--that was stealing--and she was the only person in the world I had a right to ask anything of!"

It was a bitter lesson, and was rendered more so by the fact that when I carried the tear-bathed potato back to the street and laid it down, neither the woman who bought nor the man who sold was in sight--and, dear Heaven! I could almost have eaten it raw.

But I was learning obedience and self-respect; more than that, I was already acquiring one of the necessary qualities for an actress--the power of close observation.

The next four years (the second group) were the hardest to endure of them all. True, I now had sufficient food and warmth, since my mother had given up sewing for shops--which kept us nearly always hungry--and had found other occupations. But the great object of both our lives was to be together, and there are few people who are willing to employ a woman who has with her a child. And if her services are accepted, even at a reduced salary, it is necessary for that child to be as far as possible neither seen nor heard. Therefore until I was old enough to be admitted into a public school I never knew another child--I never played with any living creature save a remarkable cat, that seemed to have claws all over her, and in my fixed determination to trace her purr and find out where it came from, she buried those claws to the very last one in my fat, investigating little hands.

Meantime my "fear" had assumed the shape and substance of a man, a man who bore a name that should have been loved and honored above all others, for this "bogey" of my baby days--this nightmare and dread--was my own father. When my mother had discovered his treachery--which had not hesitated to boldly face the very altar--she took her child and fled from him, assuming her mother's maiden name as a disguise. But go where she would, he followed and made scenes. Finally, understanding that she was not to be won back by sophistries, he offered to leave her in peace if she would give the child to him. And when that offer was indignantly rejected, he pleasantly informed her that he would make life a curse to her until she gave me up, and that by fair means or by foul he would surely obtain possession of me. Once he did kidnap me, but my mother had found friends by that time, and their pursuit was so swift and unexpected that he had to abandon me.