[Illustration: DAVID BELASCO _An intellectual giant_] _Chapter LXXXII_ "AUTHOR--AUTHOR" Not so long ago I was present at the first performance of a play, and during its presentation I was shocked beyond my power to describe by an incident at the same time disgusting and inconceivably vulgar. The play itself--a wearisome thing--was crude and altogether impossible. At the end of the second act, a half dozen paid ushers applauded valiantly. Before they could become wearied by their difficult task, a huge, bulky man appeared before the curtain. He ambled slowly to the center of the stage where he stood still for perhaps fifteen seconds as if to enable the audience to contemplate him in repose. Then this individual shifted his weight from one leg to the other, still keeping silent. There he stood, a sneer distorting his features, poised on one leg, the left foot pointing toward the right. He wore an ill-fitting evening suit with an abundance of shirt front, very much mussed, protruding from the confines of the waistcoat. His face, unwashed, suggested a cross between a Bill Sykes and a Caliban. Oblique, thin slits concealed a pair of green-white eyes. A strong, wide jaw that opened and shut like the snap of an alligator's was tilted forward and upward at the puzzled spectators. Finally the person, the author of the drivel we had patiently listened to, leaned over the footlights and casting a look toward the woman for whom he had deserted home, wife and children, literally snarled at the audience. "I wrote this play for the elect," he declared ferociously. A perceptible shudder ran through the house. Many men and women rose from their seats and left the theatre, refusing to remain to hear the incoherent and egotistical remarks of this revolting person. I have known this brute for twenty years, and in all that time I have never heard one human being speak anything except ill of him. Managers avoid him. Artists loathe him. Authors despise him. A moral and physical coward, this man without a friend, wanders from East to West, vulgarly attempting to foist upon a long-suffering and all-too-easily deceived public, the woman whose chief claim to public notice is the fact that she was named as co-respondent in the divorce action obtained by his wife. He continues to write plays of the underworld with inspirations obtained in the sewers of humanity and founded on ideas purloined from departed authors or stolen from the living too weak to protect themselves. His blustering, bullying tactics have enabled him to push his way upwards to some success--but no one envies him. All who know him "have his number."