None of these children can be said to have had any real childhood. Those summers together (there appear to have been two of them) provided about all they ever had in the way of playmates of their own age. The opening of each amusement season found them back on the road, trouping, with grown-up players as companions. Naturally, they did not go to school—not during those earlier years—but picked up such rudiments of instruction as it was possible to acquire in stuffy, badly-lighted, dressing rooms, in jolting day coaches and in casual nooks and corners of the world’s worst hotels. I cannot speak for the others, but I am sure that Lillian and Dorothy had very little in the way of regular schooling until they were in, or near, their ’teens. Had it been otherwise, they would have been quite certain, I think, to remember.

It was during this period that the Gerry Society became their bogey man. They did not know what it was, but only that it was something likely to grab them in any strange city, in a dark hall or alley, as they entered or left the theatre. It would take them out of the theatre, they were told, so they would not be able to earn money any more, and maybe put them into an “Institution,” which was a terrible sounding word. To Mary Gish it was a very real menace, for she knew that she would have hard work convincing the Gerry officers that her children were getting proper care and education, playing six nights and two matinÉes a week, sleeping and eating in that sketchy fashion of the road. They did not linger on the street, they did not show themselves more than necessary, especially in the larger towns. Lillian, many years later, wrote:

Before I could understand what it was all about, I knew of subterfuges and evasions and tremendous plottings to keep myself and my sister acting, so that the very necessary money might be earned....

Their safety lay in their obscurity. Had they been with important companies, playing finer theatres, they would hardly have escaped.

The season of 1903-4 remains to Lillian and Dorothy the most memorable—for a very good reason: they were together, and their mother was with them. For the time, at least, Mary Gish’s dream had come true: she had secured parts for her little girls and herself in the same company. Her own part and Dorothy’s were small, but would more than pay expenses. Dorothy was a news-girl, who sold “Evenin’ pipers!” Lillian’s part was a very good one; their combined salaries were forty-five dollars per week!

The play was “Her First False Step,” another fierce melodrama; only, in this one, Lillian, instead of being nearly blown up was within an ace of being devoured by savage African lions, being rescued by the brave hero, barely in the nick of time!

There were two of the lions, and they were really savage, for later when they were sold to a circus, one of them tore out a keeper’s arm. There was a provision, however, against accidents: The lions were in a cage in which there was a sliding division, so cunningly arranged that even those who sat in the front rows could not see it. At the instant when the noble hero leaps into the cage and drags out the little victim—child of the woman he loves—while every eye is riveted on this deed of daring, the invisible partition is drawn back from behind, the lions rush in, roaring and leaping about, wild at being deprived of their prey, for at that very instant, too, the cage door is slammed shut. It was truly a terrible spectacle. Women in the audience sometimes fainted.

Once, when the safety slide had not yet been slipped into place, one of the lions took up a position at the wrong end of the cage, and refused to budge. The villain, with Lillian in his arms, had twice vowed he would fling her to the beasts, and was ready to vow again, when somebody behind the scenes had an inspiration. Two men from the wings rushed upon the villain, and while the fierce struggle for the child held the audience, the stage-hands persuaded the lion to be reasonable.

The heroine in “Her First False Step” was a tall, handsome woman, Helen Ray. Lillian and Dorothy played her two little girls. In one scene Dorothy and her “mother” are out in the snow, as Lillian rushes in, to find them. She has a lollypop for Dorothy, who claps her hands with joy while Lillian kneels by Miss Ray, saying: “Oh, mother, what are you doing out here in the cold snow?” Often it was cold enough, too. The air, not the snow. The latter was swept up every night, to be used at the next performance. Sometimes other things were swept up with it, and were likely to hit them on the head—nails, bits of wood, a little dry mouse.

A real romance goes with the “False Step” season—one with a “happy-ever-after” ending. In one of the larger towns, a young actor from another company came to a matinÉe and was much struck by the beauty of Helen Ray, whom he had never met. That night he managed to come again, and next day at rehearsal time was lingering around the stage entrance. Dorothy, with a beloved Teddybear, was playing just outside. He struck up an acquaintance with her, and was invited in, to see her other possessions. A very few minutes later he had met Helen Ray. When the season had ended, they were married. At last accounts they were still married—and happy—after more than twenty-five years.

Lillian and Dorothy, at the theatre before the others, had diversions of their own. Both dearly loved lemon sticks, especially if oranges went with them. To suck orange juice through a lemon stick was pure delight. They would run across the dressing-room and jam their oranges against the wall.

In a corner of the first-act-set, they would set up a play-house. They did not play at “acting,” like other children. They would put on long dresses, and play at “keeping house”—having a home. When it came time for the performance, they hurried, not very eagerly, to change into the costumes required for their parts. They were not unhappy. They did not reflect much whether they liked what they were doing, or not. They just did it. The parts they played were always sad—pathetic, but not more so than their lives. They did not know that, but their mother did.

If one might have looked into Mary Gish’s heart at this time, just what would one have found there? Chiefly, of course, devotion to her children—thought of their immediate welfare and needs. After that? Was it to equip them for the career of actresses—a life which, unless they were at the top, was hardly to be called enviable, and even at its best was one of impermanent triumphs and fitful rewards? She knew pretty well that with their special kind of beauty, which each day she saw develop—their flair for subtle phases of human portrayal—given health, they could count on at least reasonable success. Did she greatly desire that? I think not. I think she considered it, but that her real purpose was to keep her children and herself on the stage only until by close, the very closest, economy, she had saved enough to establish herself in a permanent business which would give them a home, where they could go to school and grow into normal, or what she regarded as normal, womanhood. I think the old prejudice which she had shared with her family as to the theatre, did not die easily, and that for years she felt herself more or less “beyond the pale,” willing to stay there only because it meant a livelihood, with the possibility of something better, something with a home in it, not too far ahead. We shall see the effort she made in this direction, by and by, and what came of it—how the web of circumstance had its will with her, as with us all.

Whatever her plan, Mary Gish saw that she must educate her children. Herself reared in a town that rather specializes in education, she had known the advantage of excellent public schools. That her children should have less than herself was a distressing thought. From little books, at every spare moment, she taught them. In every town of importance, she made it her business to learn what she could of its history, its population, its industries, and of these she told them in as interesting a form as she could invent. In the South, she told them of the war; when it was possible, showed them landmarks, often taking them on little excursions.

In one city she had a special interest: Chattanooga, where an uncle, a Captain McConnell, had been killed in the battle above the clouds. When she found they had time there, she took the children for a drive up Lookout Mountain, telling them the story as they went along. And then a remarkable thing happened: they came to a tablet by the roadside, and paused to read the inscription. It was a tablet to Captain McConnell, commemorating his bravery.

She did not hold them to schoolbooks. She read them story books, or allowed an actor named Strickland—“Uncle High” in the play, because he was so tall—to read to them—from “Black Beauty,” which was their favorite, and Grimm’s and Andersen’s Fairy Tales. In a seat on the train, when all were awake at once, or during a wait in a station—oh, anywhere—Uncle High was faithful, and those little girls never ceased to remember it.

Uncle High was really very tall—“six feet six, and skinny as a blue-racer” according to one of the notices. In the play there was a house-warming, at which he was one of the guests. When Uncle High entered, Lillian, the “golden-haired grandchild,” was moved to examine him. They stood just at the footlights, and very deliberately she looked him up and down until the snickering audience was still. Then very gravely: “Grandpa, what is he standing on?” a line, according to Uncle High, that was “always a scream.”

“Uncle High” further remembers that “no matter what time of night Lillian and Dorothy had to get out of a warm, comfortable bed to catch a train, or how many times they had to be awakened to change cars, no one ever heard a whimper or complaint from either, and I cannot recall one instance where they ever found any fault with anything, and I never heard their mother speak a cross word to either of them. Lillian was just like a little mother to Dorothy, and looked after her all the time. Her whole life seemed to be to watch that nothing happened to her little sister. And Lillian only eight years old.” She was, in fact, considerably less.

Mrs. Gish’s skillful handicraft included drawing. She had received no art instruction but her pen sketches were exquisite. She thought them poor, and destroyed them. There remains only a water-color interior—subtle in tone, atmospheric—of a quality that commands immediate attention.

It seems curious that she should also have had a taste for mechanics. Delicate mechanics. She enjoyed taking a clock apart and putting it together again. A clock that did not go was her delight. Once that winter, when they were all together, a clock in their room had gone out of commission. Mary Gish examined it, then set to work. In a brief time she had it on the operating table, the pieces here and there. Dorothy’s deep interest may have had something to do with the fact that when she came to assemble them, two insignificant bits seemed to be missing. Never mind, the clock would go without them. It would go, but with a gay indifference to time, and every little while made queer noises in its inside. Lillian and Dorothy, in bed in that room, laughed themselves to sleep, listening to its complaints.

They found amusement where they could—the situation was so often barren enough. Once, remembering, Lillian said:

“Sometimes the theatre was very poor, and the dressing-rooms nearly always bad (even to this day they could be better). Some were worse than others. At a theatre in Chicago, a theatre of the second or third class, a good way out, the dressing-rooms were in a kind of cellar. There was water on the floor—we had to walk on boards. I remember the big, black water-bugs. Mother had to shake out our dresses, before we put them on.

“The Gerry Society was very strict in Chicago. We hardly dared to show ourselves outside the theatre and hotel. Four or five years later, when I was perhaps twelve, and we were there again, Mother put me into long skirts and high heels, so that I could look sixteen, and reduce the risk. I felt very proud to be grown-up in that sudden way.”

But the winter travel was hardest. One town they were to play could be reached only from a junction, six miles distant. That night a terrible blizzard came up, and the company, quite a large one, had to be driven cross-country in big farm sleighs, bedded with straw. It was terribly cold, their feet became ice. And when they arrived, the train was five hours late! The place was just a telegraph office; the little girls were allowed to stretch out on the desks, which were sloping;—members of the company took turns, holding them from rolling off.

The problem of food was a serious one, especially in the smaller towns of the Middle West. Dorothy was robust, and seemed to thrive on anything; Lillian needed better fare.

“Dorothy and I lived, when we could, on ice-cream and cake. Mother would give us fifteen cents, and we would spend ten cents for ice-cream, half vanilla and half chocolate. With the other five we bought lady-fingers. We mixed the cream, stirred the two kinds together, and made ‘mashed potatoes’; then we spread it on the lady-fingers.”

It does not seem very substantial, nor an over-plentiful allowance. They were being very economical, trying to get a little money ahead. At one wonderful restaurant—in some Western town—they were able to get a meal for ten cents! Just one place like that: soup, meat, potatoes, and a piece of pie! Perhaps it was not very good, but it seemed good, to them.

And two places in the South—good negro cooking:

“At Richmond and Norfolk, we went to boarding-houses, where we had chicken and ham at one meal, and sweet potatoes, and gingerbread! Nothing could be better than that. We were always happy when we were going to those places; and there was a park in one of those towns where there were squirrels. We bought peanuts, and they would hurry up to be fed.

“There was another place—it was in New Haven—that Dorothy and I looked forward to. In the hall next the dressing-rooms, was a small sliding door, or window, and beyond it an ice-cream salon. We could knock on the magic door and it would open, and a chocolate ice-cream soda be handed through. You can’t imagine how wonderful that seemed to us ... like something out of Fairyland. Then there was a place in Philadelphia—an automat—the only one we had ever seen. It was the delight of our hearts. We were willing to walk miles, to get to it.”

Philadelphia was remembered for another reason. A considerable number of newsboys attended a matinÉe of “Her First False Step,” and hissed the villain and cheered the brave hero and the two little heroines in good, orthodox fashion. At the end of the play, the delegation hurried out and assembled at the back. When Lillian and Dorothy, in velveteen hats and coats and patent leather shoes, stepped from the stage door, they were waited upon by a meek and almost speechless committee of two and presented with two rare bottles of perfume, the best “five-and-ten” that money could buy. The stars bowed and spoke their thanks. After which, there was something resembling a cheer, and an almost uncanny disappearance of their admirers.

A very serious thing happened: At Scranton, Dorothy awoke one morning with what proved to be scarlet fever. It was not a severe case, but the company, knowing the certainty of quarantine, fled at once, bag and baggage, taking Lillian with them. The hotel faced the station platform, a high one, almost on a level with the windows of Mrs. Gish’s room. Lillian, waiting for the train that would take her away from them, could see her mother and Dorothy at the window, waving a tearful good-bye. It seemed as if her heart must break.

How long they were separated is not remembered—possibly not more than a fortnight. Dorothy’s part was abandoned. Later, she was given the part that had been played by Lillian. And this is curious: Lillian herself had never been at all afraid when she was thrust into the lions’ cage, but now that Dorothy had the part, it made her almost frantic when she heard the lions roaring, and knew that her little sister was being put in there.

The season appears to have closed in Boston, and for whatever reason—possibly Dorothy was not yet over-strong—Mrs. Gish went by day-coach to New York, putting Dorothy and Lillian into an upper berth, in the sleeper. They had with them a small dog—a Boston bull puppy, which the stage-hands had given them—and all night long, they took turns sitting up with it. One slept while the other watched, with more or less success. Then, next morning, they were in New York, tired but triumphant. They were returning from a long season—forty weeks!—and on the whole, a successful one. Two little actresses! They were beginning to realize what their work meant.

It seems unnecessary to speak of the quality of their acting. We really know nothing of it; we can only assume that, like the majority of actors, old or young, they did just about what they were told, and through repetition, and because they were intelligent, learned to do it well.

They had begun too early to be either awkward, or frightened, after the first one or two performances. The people beyond the footlights did not bother them at all. They scarcely knew they were there. Lillian, later:

“I had very little consciousness of the audience, in those days. When they applauded or laughed, I hardly noticed it. I remember wondering what they were laughing about. To become an actress, one cannot begin too soon.”