"Would you like to go to America?" he asked.
"I would not care to; but I want an engagement."
"This is the only thing open. Want to go?"
"Yes."
"Then be at the theatre to-morrow at ten. Bring some music."
At ten I arrived, and found myself one of about fifty applicants. I sat and listened to numbers of voices being tried,—when again the manager appeared suddenly from nowhere in particular.
"Holtzmeyer here?"
I came forward.
"Sing, please," he ejaculated, and disappeared behind the linen covering of the boxes. In the middle of a cadenza he emerged.
"That'll do. Come to my office. I'll engage you if you want to go."
Almost before I knew where I was, I had signed a contract to come to America to play small parts and understudy the contralto.
The manager appeared most interested, and said that, as I was a stranger, he would see that his agent found me a good boarding-place and paid all expenses for me.
"Now," said he, "about salary. All you want is pocket-money. Will a pound a week buy your boots and gloves?"
I laughed: I had never had so much to spend on them.
"All right," said he; and the contract was signed.
Oh, what a storm raged when I broke it to my people! I was disowned by more relatives than I ever knew I had. One aunt requested me never to expect her daughters to notice me again, and desired me not so much as to bow to them if I met them. I offered to break my contract it the family would undertake to give me my expenses and a pound a week pocket-money, but this no one desired to do, and the remark was considered ribald. So, amid general condemnation, I sailed, and landed in America that pernicious thing an actress.
I had been in the country but a very short while when I learned that my salary, even for a beginner, was a very small one, and fortuitous circumstances arose which in a very few weeks enabled me to give up my engagement and take another that brought me in thirty-five dollars a week. From that moment my salary steadily increased, and I learned from bitter experience that the stage only offered a woman entirely dependent on herself the means to earn a comfortable living.
Is it not a hard thing that the only profitable channel open to women should be closed by the superstitious prejudice of the world?
The women of to-day must work. It is only right that they should choose the employment for which they are best adapted. How much wiser and kinder to let the worker ennoble the work, and allow the poor struggling girl all the social privileges that are the right of her happier and wealthier sister, than to force her to accept harassing and underpaid work at the risk of social degradation and ostracism!
