My father died on June 30, 1917. The direct cause of his death was uræmic poisoning, sequent on angina pectoris. His personal reticence was extreme; he disliked strangers about him and depended on me; it was, therefore, my very great privilege to wait on and nurse him in his final sickness. His suffering was indescribable and was exceeded only by his invariable patience and gentleness. The last thing he ever wrote was the Dedication of this book. At about eleven o’clock on the night of June 9 he endeavored to compose himself to sleep. I sat at the door of his bedroom until about midnight, when, as it was obvious that he could not sleep and that he was in terrible distress, I went to him. The next two hours were specially hard: there is little that can be done in such circumstances but to hope for the release of death. Anybody who has seen and heard the piteous restlessness and the dreadful, strangulated breathing characteristic of such a condition as my father’s then was is not likely to forget them. At about two o’clock in the morning, his breathing and his pulse both being so bad that I believed he was then to die, he asked to be helped out of bed into a chair. I lifted him into one, and, after a little while, he asked, with much difficulty, “Is there paper—pencil, here?” Supposing that he wished to write some request or message that he was not able to speak, I immediately gave him a pad of paper and a pencil. He sat for a few minutes with them in his lap, gathering his strength. Then he took them up and slowly, painfully, wrote the Dedication of this book, all except the four lines of verse with which it ends. He made a mark beneath the text and wrote there “Four lines of verse—not finished yet.” A while later he seemed to grow easier and presently asked to be got back to bed. The next day, June 10, in the forenoon, he asked me to help him to dress, which I did: it was the last time he ever had his clothes on. He read for a little while in one of his favorite books, Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,”—the passage relative to the execution of Dr. Dodd. He presently spoke to me, in his old, gentle, whimsical way, of “the touching resignation shown in Johnson’s letter to the fact that Dodd was going to be hanged.” Then, after an interval of acute and dreadful distress, he spoke of his illness. He said: “It is my principle to go on. I felt that I was going to die last night,—that’s why I wrote the Dedication to the ’Belasco.’ I feared I should die before I could complete that work and the three other books I have undertaken. But my principle is to go on: to hold on, till the end—and then, still hold on! I do not mean to break. But I am very sick.” Soon afterward he became so weak that it was necessary to get his clothes off and lift him back to bed. In the afternoon he roused himself again,—rising above the tide of poison which was slowly submerging him, as visibly as a drowning man rises in water,—and asked for the Dedication, which I had typewritten. He sat up in bed and revised it, as it now stands, and then added the four lines of verse. Although he had been suffering horribly for days he made but one mistake in writing the Dedication: he wrote “useless” instead of “useful“—and was much vexed with himself for doing so. In the last line of the verse he first wrote “boy”; in the evening he changed that word to “son.”
Among the manuscript notes left by my father I have found the beginning of a Preface to this book, which I think it desirable to print here because it gives in his words some intimation of his purpose and feeling in undertaking the writing of it:
David Belasco is the leading theatrical manager in the United States; the manager from whom it is reasonable to expect that the most of achievement can proceed that will be advantageous to the Stage, as an institution, and to the welfare of the Public to which that institution is essential and precious. I have long believed that a truthful, comprehensive, minute narrative of his career,—which has been one of much vicissitude and interest,—ought to be written now, while he is still living and working, when perhaps it may augment his prosperity, cheer his mind, and stimulate his ambition to undertake new tasks and gain new honors. In that belief I have written this book, not as a panegyric, but as a Memoir.
IN MEMORIAM
“Earthly Fame
Is fortune’s frail dependent; yet there lives
A Judge, who, as man claims by merit, gives:
To whose all-pondering mind a noble aim,
Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed;
In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed.”
—Wordsworth
photograph by I. Almstaedt, Staten Island.
Son of Jefferson Winter.