Life and Lillian Gish

There was a stone quarry in the play, and some papier-maché rocks, probably carried by the company. At the climax of the third act, the villain—there was always a villain—places the child at the bottom of the stone quarry, then lights a fuse to explode a charge of dynamite which will hurl rocks, and the poor innocent child, into the air. Is the child killed? Dear, no! In the nick of time, the hero swings out upon a rope, swoops down into the pit, seizes the child and swings himself and his precious charge to safety, just as the dynamite explodes.

Inasmuch as a delicate, real flesh-and-blood, child might not stand the wear of being handled in that reckless way, a neatly made dummy-duplicate of Lillian was placed in the pit for the hero to grab. Lillian had been carefully taught to creep to safe hiding behind some of the papier-mâché rocks before the explosion, and knew just how to do it. They practiced now on the barn stage, and it went off perfectly. They forgot one thing, however: They forgot to tell the “lovely and gifted Florence Niles” that the explosion would make a sudden and very big noise. In the rehearsals, somebody had merely said “BOOM,” which wasn’t at all the same thing.

Evening came, and the big barn was filled with farmers and townspeople, a breathless audience. Florence Niles, aged six, lay safely behind a stout papier-mâché rock, waiting for somebody to say “Boom!” But then, just at the instant when the villain or somebody should have said “Boom!” something else, something very terrific and awful, happened: a real BOOM in fact—one that fairly shook the barn, and made the audience jump and say something. The gifted Florence Niles did not stop to see what became of her double, but with a shriek, shot out from behind the rock and across the stage as fast as her legs could carry her, while the audience shouted for joy.

Never again would the climax go off as well as that. When the curtain fell, and Lillian—that is to say, Florence Niles—on the hero’s shoulder, passed in the procession before it, they received a great ovation.

And this was not so far from that modest house in Springfield, Ohio, where just six years earlier Mary Gish had waited for her first-born.

I do not know what the next stop was, and it does not matter, any more. The family likeness among one-night-stands was strong. The child actress presently did not mind the explosion—not so much—she only stopped her ears for it, and always she took the curtain call on the shoulder of the big hero, who adored her, and would have swung, regardless of explosions, into any quarry, any time, night or day, to save her.

How kind they were, all of them! Aunt Alice especially. She had a round, smiling face, and a round, soft, motherly body. Just right for the character part she played … just right for a little girl to snuggle up to, those nights on the train when there was no empty seat where one could really stretch out and sleep. Any of the company would gladly have given a shoulder to that golden head, and did, in turn, but no one except Aunt Alice had such a nice, soft shoulder, with such a good smell—no tobacco or anything—just Aunt Alice.

But the nights were quite hard, sometimes:—hard … and strange. Even when she got a seat all to herself and was covered by somebody’s coat, and sound asleep, it did not last. At any station a crowd of noisy people might come in, and a fat woman, or a thin woman with a baby, or somebody, would need the seat; and struggling to get her eyes open, and almost dead, Lillian would shrink back into her corner, and start at the rest of the company, huddled into the unusual attitudes of sleep.

The train did queer things to people. Such remarkable people … when one was awake to notice. Men—women, too—with funny faces. Country-jakes and their girls. Boys who stared at her, and if she turned on them suddenly, acted so crazily … babies—that mostly cried … fat people … thin people … dirty people … even clean and pretty ones.

Sometimes faces and people were there very uncertainly—perhaps not really there at all—just a part of some dream. One dreamed and dreamed, especially if one was not very well. Sometimes she woke with a dry, feverish mouth, and staggered down the aisle for a drink. Sometimes she was awakened by being bumped and jerked, this way and that, switching, with engine bells that swept by with a watery sound.

Faces … faces—one could even invent faces, especially just as one was going to sleep … or they just came of themselves … like the train boy, who brought a strong smell of oranges. Sometimes Aunt Alice would let her buy one, and a lemon stick to push into it. That was heaven. One could suck the lemon stick and dig into one’s corner and go to sleep. Or press one’s cheek against the glass and watch the snow or rain or solid dark go by, with sometimes a light … far off, or perhaps quite near. Somebody would be where the light was—somebody lived there. On clear nights there were stars—even a moon that made the snow fields very white, and traveled with the train, no matter how fast or far it went.

So much snow: fields of snow, hills of snow; villages with snow on the roofs, and in the dooryards, looking white and deserted in the moonlight. And tunnels—long, terrible, gasping tunnels; and big towns where the train slowed down with a great clackety-clack of wheels, and there was confusion—shouting, and rumbling baggage trucks, and where probably one had to change and sit in a station, or work one’s way through the iron arms that divided up the seats, so one could stretch out, and really sleep a little, at last. Not long, of course, for the other train would soon come shrieking in, and Aunt Alice or the hero, or Corinne, the soubrette, or somebody, would drag her through the iron divisions, and maybe carry her onto it, and if she didn’t remember that she had gone to bed before, she was apt to say her “Now I lay me” over again, and “God bless Mama and Dorothy, and keep them safe and well, and please, God, let me wake up in Heaven,” which she always added. And then, if there were no more changes that night, almost right away it was morning, with coal-dust, and cinders, and gray outside at first … with perhaps a streaky sky … or dull and drowned with rain … or caught up in a whirl of snow; and the train boy came through and sold her a sandwich for breakfast; or maybe they had reached the next show-town, and she went scurrying down the platform, holding Aunt Alice’s hand and lugging the little telescope bag, to a lunch counter where there might be something warm.... Not really a “pleasure excursion,” but long afterwards she did not regret it—she even found something “rather beautiful” in it.

They did not really “put up” at hotels. They merely “put in,” at a cheap one, for the day. Aunt Alice would get a room for fifty cents, until theatre time. Then the two soubrettes—good-hearted, even if rather tough, girls—would come to “call,” to share the room, each paying ten or fifteen cents. All stretched out on the bed, the sofa, anywhere, to catch up with their sleep. They only got up to eat—something they brought in, or at a restaurant, a cheap one (oh, worse in that day than now!)—or for a matinée.

If they were awake and there was nothing else to do, Aunt Alice taught her charge from a little book, and told her about a number of useful things. For one thing, it was quite wrong. Aunt Alice said, to kill animals, and not really healthy to eat their flesh. Vegetables, bread, milk and eggs had in them all that was good for human beings. Aunt Alice was a vegetarian, and advised Lillian to become one. Lillian liked the sound and size of the word, and could not bear the thought of killing anything—animals especially. Besides, at the places they ate, one could get more vegetables than meat for one’s money. One could get quite a lot of potatoes for a nickel, or a dime; other things, too—baked beans, which she still loved, and rice. They were not always good—sometimes greasy and tasteless, but they filled up. Often the butter was bad, especially. Still, if one could have a piece of pie at the end … or a plate of ice cream—a five cent plate … she became a vegetarian.

All the actors paid their own expenses, except train fares. Unlike Dorothy, Lillian received only ten dollars a week, but by close economy could send more than half of it to her mother. Perhaps the economy was too close, the physical foundation she was laying too slender.

And there was more than the need of food and sleep. A child—the wistful, heart-hungry child that she was—needed more than even the kind-hearted care of Aunt Alice: … Companions, play … the comfort of a mother’s arms.... Darkness gathering in a lonely hotel room—a little figure crouching at the window, staring into the night.

“What are you looking at, dear?”

“Nothing, Aunt Alice—just looking.”

Always her reply would be the same—always the same heart-hunger behind it. A dozen, twenty years later, a slender, white figure on a window seat, staring into the depths of the California night.

“What are you looking at, Lillian?” her mother asks.

“Nothing, Mother; just looking.”

Sometimes when the town was quite large and they played more than one night, she got to sleep in a real bed, could take off her clothes and have a bath—how splendid! Sometimes the paper in such a town had a piece in it about the play, even once or twice with her picture. The others thought this very fine, especially where their names were mentioned. They bought a lot of the papers, and cut out the pieces. Lillian did not value the notices very highly; what the paper said was not always true. The picture was of the same sad-faced little girl she saw every morning in the glass when Aunt Alice combed her hair. When one of the company gave her a clipping for herself, she politely said “Thank you,” and put it away in her little telescope, but she seldom looked at it.

One performance was like another; but then came one which brought her a special and rather wide publicity. In the play was a prison scene, where a guard, a lame guard, Cliff Dean, carried a rifle, loaded with a blank cartridge. During the performance at Fort Wayne, Indiana, the unfortunate guard dropped his gun, and it went off. Lillian, close by, received the charge in her leg, and was badly powder-burned. No burn hurts worse than that. She screamed and ran off the stage. The leading man, the hero, was going down some steps that led to the dressing-rooms. He picked her up and carried her down, soothing and comforting her. Others not in the scene gathered to help. The wounded leg was bathed and bandaged. The play upstairs did not stop. The audience may have thought the incident just a part of it.

The next act was the last one, and Lillian’s share in it important. She was suffering terribly, but she said she would go on, and did. Few, if any, of the spectators knew what had happened. When, after the show, the facts were known, they crowded the lobby of the hotel and watched the doctor pick the powder grains out of the tender flesh. It was torture, but Florence Niles, the child actress, refused to cry. Some of the powder had to stay under the skin and remain there permanently, like tattoo.

Alice Niles did not write to Mary Gish of the accident, but of course it got into the Western papers. Grandfather McConnell, in Dayton, saw it, and sent her a clipping. Certain of the family may have regarded it as a kind of retribution for permitting one of her own to follow such a calling. The biblical-minded can always identify punishment, even when it falls on the innocent child, or flocks, of the transgressor. The fact that her children and herself had become play-actors was for years not mentioned by Mary Gish’s family to their friends—nor discussed among themselves.

The company did not perform on Sundays—nor always travel—but stayed in a hotel room; shabby, but how luxurious! Aunt Alice mended their clothes—washed them. Florence Niles, the child actress, helped. All the others were doing the same. Sometimes they dropped in, to visit. Among them they taught her to read. The patter of the stage and much general information she picked up unconsciously. Nothing that was evil—certainly nothing that she recognized as such—neither then nor ever. More than twenty years later she wrote:

Stage children are in most cases more sheltered than those who go to school. They constantly associate with older people who are, as a rule, most careful what they say in front of them.

In after years, she remembered that once a stage hand had knocked another one down because he swore in front of her. Some of the company may have been a bit dissipated, even dissolute; if so, it was outside of her knowledge. There would come a day when she would realize that the soubrettes probably had been as “tough” off as on the stage—that some of the others were not saints. But to her, then, they were, and in her memory would always remain, the best people in the world.

And talented; they said so themselves. All, including Lillian, looked forward to playing New York. The others because it might mean a Broadway engagement where their talents would be appreciated. Lillian, because New York would mean her mother … better meals … a bed to sleep in at night. Considerately, she did not mention these things, but looked out of the window, thinking long thoughts. And this picture I am trying to present is not only of that first year, but of the years that followed it, one so nearly like another—except for the parts she took and the rapidly increasing length of her slim legs—that in later years she found it by no means easy to distinguish them.

Two events remembered from that first far-off engagement were particularly tragic, both connected with running for trains. Always they seemed to have been running for trains. Every night after the performance there was the same scramble, even though they had to wait for hours in a station that was too hot or too cold, with only those divided benches to sleep on, or the telegraph desk, when the station agent took pity on a tired little theatre-girl.

And often it seemed to be raining, or snowing, when they started for the train, and there were single-board-crossings over the ditches, where you could not hold to Aunt Alice’s hand and stay under her umbrella, and where it was not easy for someone to pick you up, because all the talented company carried their baggage, every fellow for himself.

So it happened that on one of those rainy nights, when she was running behind Aunt Alice, across a narrow foot-bridge, lugging her little telescope bag—there, right in the middle of the bridge—the treacherous strap gave way, and all her possessions—her little nightgown, her little extra stockings and underwears, her press-clippings, everything—disappeared in the black, rushing torrent below. She did not stop—no time for that, and no use, anyway—but raced on after Aunt Alice, holding fast to the useless little strap of the telescope, and crying—oh, crying. No money to send home that week—so many things to buy.

The other event, scarcely less tragic, was also of the night and rain. She was wearing the little white furs that once an uncle had bought for her, and that she so dearly loved. All about were mud puddles, and by some misstep she plunged into one, and the precious furs could never be the same again. Rain! Rain! Once in the South, on the Seaboard Air Line, it fairly poured, and the rickety old day-coach leaked. The whole company had to sit holding umbrellas, to keep from getting soaked. Lillian always remembered that, as something different.

Christmas that year she remembered, too. A little present had come from Mother—very precious—but there was still more to this Christmas than that—a good deal more. All day they were on a freight train, a train that lumbered and bumped along, and stopped for what seemed hours in the towns, and ran up and down, pulling and pushing all kinds of freight cars, in and out and around, sometimes slamming them into your part of the train, until it seemed your head must certainly come off. You had to ride in the caboose, not at all a nice place—just long, dirty benches on the side, and grimy train men coming in, leaving the doors open, to let in the cold.

But then came a stop at quite a big town, where there was certain to be a lot of switching and backing, which would take a good while. A good many of the company “went ashore,” and when by and by they came back they brought, of all things, a Christmas Tree! A little, green tree that they set up right in the old, dingy caboose; and then they opened packages and hung balls and candy canes on the little tree, and even presents. And all the rest of that day, the gay little tree rode and rode, and the old caboose wasn’t dingy any more, and one’s heart could almost break with happiness over a thing like that. Surely in all the world there was never such another Christmas Tree!