Meantime, Belasco had been left in a painful predicament. “I had,” he told me, “quite honestly, but very extravagantly, painted our success in brilliant colors when writing to my dear wife,—and there I was, in Philadelphia, without enough money to pay my fare back to San Francisco, and nobody to borrow from. I went, first, to New York, hoping to get employment, but luck was against me—I could get nothing, and I spent three nights on the benches in Union Square Park. I met Marcus Mayer, a friend of mine, in the Park one morning, and he got part of my story from me, lent me some money, and promised to try to help me further. But I had to get to San Francisco, and as soon as he lent me a little money I made up my mind to start. It took me eighteen days to make the trip, but I did it,—paying what I could, persuading conductors and brakemen to let me ride free, if only for a few miles, and, when I was put off, stealing rides on anything that was going. I got there, but it was a pretty wretched homecoming. I had to swallow any pride I had left and go to work again at the Baldwin,—where I’d been stage manager and playwright and amounted to something,—and where now I played anything,—‘bits,’ mostly,—given me: I got only $25 a week.”

The story of Belasco’s venture with “Hearts of Oak” has been told minutely for the reason that it involves his first determined effort to break away from what he viewed as thraldom in the Theatre of San Francisco, and make for himself a position in the metropolis of the country. The failure of that effort was a bitter humiliation and disappointment to him. It did not, however, weaken his purpose. After he rejoined the Baldwin he was not long constrained to occupy a subservient position.