IX
“HER FIRST FALSE STEP”
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.
Small “dodger” scattered about the towns before a performance.