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:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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