Mary Anderson | Page 8

little speech, which was received with much enthusiasm, and retired almost overcome with pleasure and pride. The youthful actress, who had then not completed her seventeenth year, took by storm the hearts of the impulsive and chivalrous Southerners. On the morning of her departure, she found to her astonishment that the railway company had placed a fine "Pullman" and special engine at her disposal all the way to Louisville. Generals Beauregard and Hood, with many distinguished Southerners, were on the platform to bid her farewell, and she returned home with purse and reputation, both marvelously grown.
After a brief period spent in diligent study, Mary Anderson fulfilled a second engagement in New Orleans, which proved a great financial success. The criticisms of this period all admit her histrionic power, though some describe her efforts as at times raw and crude, faults hardly to be wondered at in a young girl mainly self-taught, and with barely a year's experience of the business of the stage.
About this time Mary Anderson met with the first serious rebuff in her hitherto so successful career. It happened, too, in California, the State of her birth, where she was to have a somewhat rude experience of the old adage, that "a prophet has no honor in his own country." John McCullough was then managing with great success the principal theater in San Francisco, and offered her a two weeks' engagement. But California would have none of her. The public were cold and unsympathetic, the press actually hostile. The critics declared not only that she could not act, but that she was devoid of all capability of improvement. One, more gallant than his fellows, was gracious enough to remark that, in spite of her mean capacity as an artist, she possessed a neck like a column of marble. It was only when she appeared as Meg Merrilies that the Californians thawed a little, and the press relented somewhat. Edwin Booth happened to be in San Francisco at the time, and it was on the stage of California that Mary Anderson first met the distinguished actor who had been her early stage ideal. He told her that for ten years he had never sat through a performance till hers; and the praises of the great tragedian went far to console her for the coldness and want of sympathy in the general public. It was by Booth's advice, as well as John McCullough's, that she now began to study such parts as Parthenia, as better suited to her powers than more somber tragedy. Those were the old stock theater days in America, when every theater had a fair standing company, and relied for its success on the judicious selection of stars. This system, though perhaps a somewhat vicious one, made so many engagements possible to Mary Anderson, whose means would not have admitted of the costlier system of traveling with a special company.
The return journey from California was made painfully memorable by a disastrous accident to a railway train which had preceded the party, and they were compelled to stop for the night at a little roadside town in Missouri. The hotels were full of wounded passengers, and scenes of distress were visible on all sides. When they were almost despairing of a night's lodging, a plain countryman approached them, and offered the hospitality of his pretty white cottage hard by, embosomed in its trees and flowers. The offer was thankfully accepted, and soon after their arrival the wife's sister, a "school mar'm," came in, and seemed to warm at once to her beautiful young visitor. She proposed a walk, and the two girls sallied forth into the fields. The stranger turned the subject to Shakespeare and the stage, with which Mary Anderson was fain to confess but a very slight acquaintance, fearing the announcement of her profession would shock the prejudices of these simple country folk, who might shrink from having "a play actress" under their roof. Some months after the party had returned home there came a letter from these kind people saying how, to their delight and astonishment, they had accidentally discovered who had been their guest. It seemed the sister was an enthusiastic Shakespearean student, and all agreed that in entertaining Mary Anderson they had "entertained an angel unawares."
The California trip may be said to close the first period of Mary Anderson's dramatic career. With some draw-backs and some rebuffs she had made a great success, but she was known thus far only as a Western girl, who had yet to encounter the judgment of the more critical audiences of the South and East, as years later, with a reputation second to none all over the States as well as in Canada, she essayed, with a success which has been seldom equaled, perhaps never surpassed, the