Volume 1 — DEATH OF BELASCO’S MOTHER.—“CAN THE DEAD COME BACK?”—A STRANGE EXPERIENCE.

The instant and immense popular success of “Zaza” was embittered for Belasco by close association with a loss and sorrow that time has not lightened,—the death of his beloved mother, which befell on January 11, 1899, at No. 174 Clara Street, San Francisco. During rehearsals of his play and its presentments in Washington Belasco, so he has told me, “had felt that she was ill,” but had no thought that her condition was critical. Writing about her death, he gives the following interesting account of a strange experience:

“Ever since my boyhood I have been interested in the subject of spiritualism. For many years I have asked myself the question: ’Can the dead come back?’... One morning, after a late rehearsal, I reached home at three o’clock, completely fagged out. No sooner had I fallen asleep than I seemed to waken, and there stood my mother beside my bed. ’Davie, Davie, Davie,’ she said three times, smiled, and bending over kissed me good-bye. She said other things—told me she was happy—not to grieve. I could not stir, but kept my eyes fixed upon her as she moved towards the door and disappeared. How long I lay staring into the darkness I do not know, but at last I managed to collect myself, put on my dressing-gown, and, still dazed, went downstairs to a little sitting-room. My family heard me. ’What are you doing downstairs?’ my youngest child, Augusta, asked, and she tried to coax me back to bed. I went to my room, but I could not sleep. When I told my family of my vision, and that I believed my mother was dead, they suggested that I was overwrought and tired and had seen my mother in a dream.

“I went to rehearsal the next morning, and during an interval had luncheon at Churchill’s—then a small coffeehouse—with a member of the theatre staff. I sat there, much troubled, thinking of the figure of my mother as she appeared in the dawn. My companion noticed my silence, and, when I told him of my experience, tried to reassure me. As we rose to go he handed me some letters and telegrams he had found in the box-office. Among the telegrams was one telling me the sad news of my mother’s death. Later I found that she died at the exact time she appeared at my bedside. At the very moment I saw her she was passing out of the world. Several years after, when I paid a visit to San Francisco, my brothers and sisters told me my mother smiled and murmured my name three times before she died.... I do not know that the dead do come back. I do know that at the time of passing the spirit sends a thought through space, and this thought is so powerful that the receiver can see the sender. This was proved by my dear mother. She came to me no more, however.”

In speaking of his parents Belasco has deeply impressed me by the fervor and sincerity of his filial affections. “My mother,” he has said, “was the best loved woman in Victoria and in San Francisco,—and she was the truest, best friend I ever had or shall have. She was called ’the Good Angel’ of the poorer quarters. As she grew older, in the latter city, when going about in streetcars, conductors would, when she wished to leave, escort her to the sidewalk, or would bring her to the car, if she wished to board it. When she died she had the greatest funeral a private person ever had in San Francisco. My brother told me it seemed as though every vehicle in town was in the line. She was very poetic, romantic, and keenly imaginative and gentleness itself. Any good I have ever done I owe to her.”—In a letter to a friend he writes thus about his mother:

“ ... I cannot tell you how close we were—how she seemed always to understand me without words and often [seemed] to be near me when I was in trouble and needed help. You know, I believe such feelings are inspired by something real: ’the realities of the spirit are more real than anything else.’... Very often we exchanged messages just by sending flowers, and it was the same way with my little ’Gussie.’... Flowers have always been a passion with me. Ever since I was a little boy, in Vancouver, and my mother used to come and find me dreaming among them on the hillside, I have loved them all.... But the violets were always my favorites, as they were hers. She always had them about her, from girlhood, and, indeed, my father wooed her with them. There was a bunch of them beside her in the little cellar-room where I was born (so she used to tell me), and when they brought me to her on a pillow she took some in her hand and sprinkled them over me. All my clothes, when I was a baby, had a violet embroidered on them, somewhere. The last gift I ever received from my mother was a black silk scarf, with violets embroidered on it,—and long, long hours it must have taken her to do it, for she could hardly hold a needle. Once, when I was a boy, I took $20 from a secret little hoard of hers, to pay for an operation on my throat which I didn’t want her to know about. Of course she missed it but she never said a word, and when I had saved up the money I just put it in a bunch of violets and left it for her. And when at last she went away and I could not be there I sent violets to cover her grave and say my ’Good-bye.’”