Photograph by Sarony.
Author’s Collection.
deck with no tender touch, and there the analogy between the little hero and myself vanished. The captain of the schooner was a friend of my father’s. ’Aren’t you Humphrey’s boy?’ he asked, and I was obliged to confess to my identity. ’Take him downstairs and wash him,’ the captain ordered, for contact with the coal had made me look like a blackamoor; despite my protestations that this was not the correct treatment for a stowaway, I was taken below. ’Give him something to eat,’ he called after us, but I was as obdurate as a militant suffragette in the matter of food. Later on, when I was ’swabbed down,’ I was taken on deck again, where I was obliged to tell the captain my story, and the reasons for my escapade. ’I’ll be blazed if I lick you as you seem to want!’ said he. I was reciting the story to the queer group gathered about me, when I suddenly realized that my old enemy seasickness was creeping over me. ’Let me scrub the floor,’ I pleaded. ’They always do.’ At first they laughingly refused, but presently, to humor me, I was put to work on a brass rail that needed shining. However, the smell of the oil polish hastened my catastrophe. I was put to bed and very glad to be there. From Vancouver I was shipped home, where I found my mother rejoiced to get me back. She was not so perturbed as she might have been, because the poor lady was used to my ’disappearances’ in search of adventure and the romantic. She always knew that I was doing something or other to gain new impressions, and her heart was wonderfully attuned to mine.”
A BOHEMIAN INTERLUDE.
Belasco left school in June, 1871. In August, 1878, he married. It has been impossible to fix precise dates for some of his proceedings within that period of about two years and three months. Though he steadily, if at first slowly, progressed, and though specific records of his doings become more and more frequent as the years pass in review, it is not until about 1876-’79 that they are numerous. During all, or almost all, of the period indicated (1871-1879),—more so in the earlier part than in the later,—he was a nomadic bohemian. At first he often roamed the streets at night and would visit the saloons and low “dives” which abounded in San Francisco, and recite before the rough frequenters of those resorts,—sometimes giving “The Maniac,” sometimes “Bernardo del Carpio,” sometimes “shockers” of his own composition (things which he wrote with facility, on any current topic that attracted his attention), and gather whatever money might be thrown to him by those unruly but often liberal auditors. On a Sunday he was sometimes fortunate enough to earn as much as ten or twelve dollars by his recitals. Another means of gain that he employed was the expedient of volunteer press reporting. He would visit every gambling “den,” opium “joint,” hospital, and police-station to which he could obtain access (the morgue was one of his familiar resorts), and write brief stories of whatever scenes and occurrences he might observe, to be sold to any newspaper that would pay for them,—when he was lucky enough to make a sale. In talking to me about his youthful days, as he has done in the course of a friendly acquaintance extending over many years, he has particularly dwelt on the intense, often morbid, and quite irresistible interest which, in early life, he felt in everything extraordinary, emotional, sensational, dramatic,—everything that might be called phenomenal. “As a young fellow,” he once said to me, “I visited the scene of every murder that I heard of—and they were many. I knew every infamous and dangerous place in San Francisco. Once I tried to interfere between a blackguard and his woman, whom he was abusing, and I got a bullet along the forehead for my trouble: I have the scar of it to this day. It was freely predicted that I would end in state’s prison, probably on the gallows. Only my dear mother seemed to understand me. My adventures and wanderings (’Wandering Feet,’ she used to call me) worried her, which I grieve to think of now, but she always took my part. ’Davy is all right,’ she used to say; ’leave him alone; he’s only curious about life, and wants to see everything with those big, dark eyes of his.’ She was right; and, if I didn’t see everything, I saw a good deal.”
The miscellaneous knowledge that young Belasco accumulated in observation of “the seamy side” of life by night, in one of the most vicious, turbulent, and perilous cities in the world,—which San Francisco certainly was, in his juvenile time,—was of much use to him when, later, he became employed as a hack-writer of sensation melodramas, in the theatres of that city and other cities of the West.
BELASCO’S EARLIEST ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE THEATRE IN SAN FRANCISCO
It is not possible to furnish an entirely full, clear, chronological account of Belasco’s earliest relations with the Theatre in San Francisco. Various current sketches of his career which I have examined either give no details as to this part of it, or make assertions about it which I have ascertained to be incorrect. The subject is not explicitly treated in his autobiographical fragment, “The Story of My Life,” a formless, rambling narrative, obviously, to a discerning reader, evolved from discursive memory, without consultation of records or necessary specification of dates or verification of statements, and which I have found to be, in many essential particulars, inaccurate. Few persons possess an absolutely trustworthy memory of dates,
